Urbanizing Islands: A Critical History of Singapore's Offshore Islands

2021 ◽  
pp. 251484862110510
Author(s):  
Creighton Connolly ◽  
Hamzah Muzaini
Keyword(s):  
Political Ecology ◽  
Indigenous Communities ◽  
Urban Political Ecology ◽  
Critical History ◽  
Urban Core ◽  
History Of ◽  
City State ◽  
The City ◽  
Environmental Inequalities ◽  
Over Time

While Singapore is often considered an island city in the singular sense, the city-state actually consists of many islands, with the Singapore mainland being by far the largest. While most of these islands traditionally had thriving indigenous communities, all have since been displaced over time as the islands were developed to service Singapore's economic and metabolic needs as a rapidly urbanizing and developing nation. Some of the islands have also undergone considerable transformation (through reclamation) which has had significant impacts on the ecologies of the offshore islands. This simultaneously allowed for the ‘ruralization’ of mainland Singapore to provide more green space for nature conservation, recreation and leisure. This paper will provide a brief history of these transformations, drawing on specific examples which serve to illustrate how Singapore's offshore islands have been redeveloped over time to service the nation-state and in response to the changing needs of the urban core. In doing so, the paper examines how spaces on the urban periphery are deeply bound up with processes of ‘urbanization’, given their important role in processes of urban metabolism. In this way, the paper contributes to recent work in urban political ecology which has sought to trace processes of urbanization beyond the city and render visible the socio-environmental inequalities produced therein.

Topography of Athens

Classics ◽  
2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffrey M. Hurwit ◽  
Ioannis Mitsios
Keyword(s):  
Coastal Plain ◽  
Aegean Sea ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Greek City ◽  
Urban Core ◽  
Ancient City ◽  
History Of ◽  
City States ◽  
City State ◽  
The City

The ancient city-state (or polis) of Athens was contiguous with the region known as Attica, a large, triangular peninsula extending southeastward from the Greek mainland into the Aegean Sea. In the western angle of Attica, on a coastal plain surrounded by four mountains (Hymettos, Pentelikon, Parnes, and Aigaleos), lay the city itself. Although the modern city has thickly spread up the slopes of the mountains as well as to the sea, the study of Athenian topography concentrates on the monuments, buildings, and spaces of the ancient urban core, an area roughly 3 square kilometers surrounding the Acropolis and defended in the Classical period by a wall some 6.5 kilometers in length. Athens is the ancient Greek city that we know best, and it is unquestionably the Greek city whose art, architecture, literature, philosophy, and political history have had the greatest impact on the Western tradition and imagination. As a result, “Athenian” is sometimes considered synonymous with “Greek.” It is not. In many respects, Athens was exceptional among Greek city-states, not typical: it was a very different place from, say, Thebes or Sparta. Still, the study of Athens, its monuments, and its culture needs no defense, and the charge of “Athenocentrism” is a hollow indictment when one stands before the Parthenon or holds a copy of Sophocles’ Antigone. This article will refer to the following periods in the history of Athens and Greece (the dates are conventional): late Bronze, or Mycenaean, Age (1550–1100 bce); Dark Age (1100–760 bce); Archaic (760–480 bce); Classical (480–323 bce); Hellenistic (323 –31 bce); and Roman (31 BCE–c. 475 ce).

scholarly journals The City-State of Boston: The Rise and Fall of an Atlantic Power, 1630–1865

2020 ◽  
Vol 94 (3) ◽  
pp. 631-636
Author(s):  
Noam Maggor
Keyword(s):  
New England ◽  
British Empire ◽  
American Revolution ◽  
Regional Autonomy ◽  
Atlantic Trade ◽  
History Of ◽  
British Colonial ◽  
City State ◽  
The City ◽  
American Nation

Mark Peterson's The City-State of Boston is a formidable work of history—prodigiously researched, lucidly written, immense in scope, and yet scrupulously detailed. A meticulous history of New England over more than two centuries, the book argues that Boston and its hinterland emerged as a city-state, a “self-governing republic” that was committed first and foremost to its own regional autonomy (p. 6). Rather than as a British colonial outpost or the birthplace of the American Revolution—the site of a nationalist struggle for independence—the book recovers Boston's long-lost tradition as a “polity in its own right,” a fervently independent hub of Atlantic trade whose true identity placed it in tension with the overtures of both the British Empire and, later, the American nation-state (p. 631).

scholarly journals Culturally inclusive water urban design: a critical history of hydrosocial infrastructures in Southern Sydney, Australia

2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 364-382
Author(s):  
Taylor Coyne ◽  
Maria de Lourdes Melo Zurita ◽  
David Reid ◽  
Veljko Prodanovic
Keyword(s):  
Urban Communities ◽  
Urban Design ◽  
Critical Analysis ◽  
Urban Water ◽  
Space Design ◽  
Critical History ◽  
History Of ◽  
Over Time ◽  
Technical Terms ◽  
Sydney Australia

Abstract Historic relationships between communities and waterscapes are complex and often explained solely in technical terms. There is a key need to understand how human-centered developments have shifted the use of river spaces over time, and how these changes reflect on the values of rivers and surrounding cultures. In this paper, we develop a critical analysis of the historically changing relationship between urban communities and water infrastructures using the Georges River catchment in Sydney, Australia. Our focus was on bringing together past and current perspectives, engaging with the formation of diverse hydrosocial behaviors entangled with water infrastructures. Using post-settlement historical documents, maps, journals, and newspaper articles, we trace shifts in hydrosocial perspectives over time, mapping six distinct historic phases. In our study, we offer a shift from the main paradigms currently influencing the development of urban water infrastructures, moving away from the dominant technical propositions of systems designed purely for the management and treatment of stormwater. Drawing on our analysis, we propose a new urban water design concept: Culturally Inclusive Water Urban Design (CIWUD). This presents an advancement on current framework to include a consideration of people's connections and uses of urban waterscapes, as well as a shift towards democratic space design.

Antinoopolis: A Hadrianic Foundation in Egypt

1940 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 133-147 ◽  
Author(s):  
H. I. Bell
Keyword(s):  
Way Of Life ◽  
History Of ◽  
City State ◽  
The City ◽  
Civic Institutions

The city state was the most characteristic expression of the Hellenic way of life; and it is appropriate that the most Philhellenic of Roman emperors should have been distinguished as a founder of cities and an encourager of civic institutions. We are ill informed about the constitution and history of most of his foundations, but concerning one, which was in Egypt, a country whose soil preserves so perfectly the antiquities which it covers, we have a considerable amount of evidence. Antinoopolis is thus of interest not only to the historian of Roman and Byzantine Egypt, but also for the light it may throw on Hadrian's aims and ideals as a founder of cities.

Prologue

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-8
Author(s):  
Michael A. Gomez
Keyword(s):  
West Africa ◽  
Political Power ◽  
The State ◽  
The Third ◽  
History Of ◽  
City State ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The City

This prologue provides an overview of the history of early and medieval West Africa. During this period, the rise of Islam, the relationship of women to political power, the growth and influence of the domestically enslaved, and the invention and evolution of empire were all unfolding. In contrast to notions of an early Africa timeless and unchanging in its social and cultural categories and conventions, here was a western Savannah and Sahel that from the third/ninth through the tenth/sixteenth centuries witnessed political innovation as well as the evolution of such mutually constitutive categories as race, slavery, ethnicity, caste, and gendered notions of power. By the period's end, these categories assume significations not unlike their more contemporary connotations. All of these transformations were engaged with the apparatus of the state and its progression from the city-state to the empire. The transition consistently featured minimalist notions of governance replicated by successive dynasties, providing a continuity of structure as a mechanism of legitimization. Replication had its limits, however, and would ultimately prove inadequate in addressing unforeseen challenges.

‘Take This Land’

2019 ◽  
pp. 186-214
Author(s):  
Patrick Inglis
Keyword(s):  
Annual Reports ◽  
Golf Course ◽  
Public Land ◽  
Government Officials ◽  
Archival Material ◽  
Competing Interests ◽  
Critical History ◽  
History Of ◽  
Economic Elites ◽  
The City

This study challenges scholarly claims about the unity of vision and purpose shared by elites in the making of neoliberal projects. As a critical history of the Karnataka Golf Association (KGA) suggests, social, political, and economic elites do not always pursue the same interests when using public land and other vital resources in service of private gain. Founding members at the club—among them industrialists, agriculture landowners, and salaried professionals—simply wanted to recreate an exclusive members-only space like the ones they inhabited elsewhere in the city, except with an international standard golf course as the main feature. Government officials without prior membership in these social and economic circles used their control of land and other resources as leverage in winning access to the club as permanent members. This chapter draws on a combination of interviews and archival material, including minutes to meetings, annual reports, and other memoranda, in order to reveal the strained negotiations that followed, and which ultimately produced a club divided by competing interests and loyalties.

The Athenian Empire

2009 ◽  
pp. 64-76 ◽  
Author(s):  
Polly Low
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Imperialism ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Many ◽  
City State ◽  
The Right ◽  
The City

This article argues that problems of terminology also plague the study of the Athenian Empire, drawing attention to the many ancient Greek words that have been translated as ‘empire’. Arriving at the right terms to describe Athenian ‘imperialism’ would go hand in hand with the larger process of understanding other features of Athens' hegemony. For example, while the financial aspects of the Athenian Empire are heavily discussed, the cultural imperialism of the city-state still needs to be analysed more fully. Further study may well show that the major importance of the empire lies in its role as the transmitter of Hellenic culture during the period of Athens' dominance and not in its place as a decisive moment in the history of imperialism.

Urban political ecology III

2017 ◽  
Vol 42 (3) ◽  
pp. 446-452 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nik Heynen
Keyword(s):  
Political Ecology ◽  
Urban Geography ◽  
Second Generation ◽  
Urban Political Ecology ◽  
Feminist Political Ecology ◽  
The Cross ◽  
The City ◽  
Queer Ecology

Given the ongoing importance of nature in the city, better grappling with the gendering and queering of urban political ecology offers important insights that collectively provides important political possibilities. The cross-currents of feminist political ecology, queer ecology, queer urbanism and more general contributions to feminist urban geography create critical opportunities to expand UPE’s horizons toward more egalitarian and praxis-centered prospects. These intellectual threads in conversation with the broader Marxist roots of UPE, and other second-generation variants, including what I have previously called abolition ecology, combine to at once show the ongoing promises of heterodox UPE and at the same time contribute more broadly beyond the realm of UPE.

Producing an urban hazardscape beyond the city

2017 ◽  
Vol 49 (9) ◽  
pp. 1968-1985 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kristian Saguin
Keyword(s):  
Political Ecology ◽  
Flood Control ◽  
The Philippines ◽  
Urban Political Ecology ◽  
Mediating Role ◽  
Metro Manila ◽  
Spatio Temporal ◽  
Urban Risk ◽  
The City ◽  
Laguna Lake

Urban socioecological risk, like other urban metabolic processes, embodies relations between the city and the non-city. In this paper, I trace the production of urban risk within and beyond the city through the lens of the hazardscape using the case of Metro Manila and Laguna Lake in the Philippines. Building on recent interventions in urban political ecology that seek to map the terrains of extending urban frontiers, I examine the processes that construct city and non-city spaces in urbanization through flood control. I synthesize narratives of the material-discursive production of risk mediated by infrastructure with histories of landscape and livelihood change in an urban socioecological frontier to make two related arguments. First, discursive constructions of city and non-city and the material flows that connect them shape the production of urban ecological risk, with material consequences for non-city vulnerabilities. Second, infrastructure plays an important mediating role in the production of hazardscapes. The intersection of flows of water, discursive urban imaginaries in state plans, and livelihoods in Metro Manila and Laguna Lake exemplifies metabolic relations that reveal the spatio-temporal connections of cities with landscapes that make their functioning possible.

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