With Adam Searle, University of Nottingham.
Part of the Environment and Society Seminar Series.
Singapore, a wealthy and densely populated island city-state, imports more than 90% of its food, despite its near self-sufficiency in the mid-twentieth century. Framed as a direct response to the expected widespread damages caused by climate breakdown and its uncertain implications for both food production and global supply chains, in 2019 the Singapore Food Agency announced policy measures to increase local production to 30% by 2030.
Primarily limited by land scarcity, these interventions have largely epitomised a form of ecomodernism with a long history in Singapore: high-tech, science driven, and capital-intensive reworkings of the environment and ecology. The article situates ecomodernist interventions in the changing foodscape in broader cultural, historical, and geographical contexts. Through the conceptual and empirical framing of metabolism—linking matter, bodies, and environments to broader sociotechnical processes—It utilises both qualitative and archival methods to examine how ‘everyday ecomodernity’ is expressed and the public affects it fosters. By focussing on three sites of ecomodernist contention—verticality, granularity, and futurity—it dwells on micropolitical action that creates opportunities for reconfiguring foodscapes otherwise.
The macropolitical solutions to food security in Singapore, where just 1% of land is set aside for food production, seek to optimise spatial efficiency in the extraction of both nutritional and capital value. Such interventions include indoor (closed environment) vertical farming, hydroponic systems, and speculative futures of cultured proteins grown in laboratories. Micropolitical gestures through acts of community gardening in high-rise public housing, soil restoration and translocation, and the temporal promises of permaculture create an excess of potentials to influence macropolitics.
Micropolitical and macropolitical foodscape interventions are mutually dependent, and should not be conceptualised as a binary, but rather a threshold of micro/macro metabolism that fosters a productive ambivalence toward ecomodernism, signalling lines of flight towards living more fully while ‘chipping away’ at macro problems.