Making Future Space: Imagining the Smart Nation in Singapore

Since independence in the 1960s, the government has articulated plans to mould Singapore into a "Smart Nation", wherein people are "empowered through increased access to data, participatory through contribution of innovative ideas, and have an anticipatory government that utilises technology to serve citizens". These initiatives have largely taken the form of inscribing data-gathering technologies into the urban fabric and into residents' homes: artificial trees measuring air quality, street cameras and taxi GPS trackers transmitting information on traffic congestion, RFID cards identifying impaired people on crosswalks, and sensors tracking motion in the homes of the elderly, to name a few. In short, Singapore is enmeshed in a dense web of "smart" technologies. But for whom is the smart city smart? How does a government imagine and materially enact a city of the future through data-gathering technologies, and how do residents engage and rework these technologies and imagined futures? How do these technologically-driven future-making attempts shape existing social relations, and how are they shaped by them?
To approach these questions, I propose to conduct an ethnography of a public housing community in Singapore, tracing the design, development, and usage of "smart" technologies that residents interact with in their daily lives, as well as the social life of the data they produce. Anthropological work on technology and the data it produces generally takes one of two forms: a study of the "elites" responsible for designing and developing the technology (e.g. Kelty 2008) or how pre-given technologies are reshaped by existing community relations and cultural norms (e.g. Miller 2011). Rather than taking a traditional approach and studying a specific social or ethnic group in Singapore (e.g. urban planners or Malay Singaporeans) I take a city as my object of study: a heterogeneous space crosscut with diverse lives, social practices, and technologies. A rapidly increasing percentage of the global population is migrating to urban areas. The Singaporean case offers a means of employing traditional ethnographic methods that seek to understand everyday lived experiences of the city, while also allowing me to move beyond studies of a single group and trace a technology in the making as it moves through diverse spatial and social domains.
My research combines a traditional community-based ethnographic approach in a residential field site with a material-semiotic approach that follows a technology (data-gathering smart home sensors) through a system. Using these intertwined approaches, I seek to understand how the future of a city is imagined, designed, and lived. The project is clearly focused in that it selects only one technology and one neighbourhood through which to look at these developments, yet open-ended in that it enquires after Singapore's aspirations for the future of the city as a whole, and how residents' daily lives are affected by technologies meant to capture their data and mould them into model urban citizens.
Housing is both a key target of Singapore's Smart Nation plan and a site of sociocultural management.
About 90 percent of citizens live in public housing blocks ("HDBs") that are highly regulated by the government. To promote what it terms "racial harmony", the government has imposed ethnic quotas, such that blocks must roughly reflect the ethnic makeup of the population: 80 percent Chinese Singaporean, 15 percent Malay Singaporean, and 5 percent Indian Singaporean. HDB towns are designed to be uniform and to have all required amenities, so residents are not motivated to burden the transit system by moving across the city. Due to these projects of social, infrastructural, and technological design, each housing block is explicitly made a microcosm of Singaporean society as a whole.
As a result, I propose to do research in an HDB town in Singapore, specifically Yuhua in Jurong East. Yuhua is of particular intere