Making Future Space: Imagining the Smart Nation in Singapore

自上世纪60年代新加坡独立以来，新加坡政府明确提出了将新加坡打造成一个“智能国家”的计划，即“通过增加获取数据的途径增强人民的能力，通过贡献创新想法实现参与性，并建立一个利用技术为公民服务的前瞻性政府”。这些举措在很大程度上采取了将数据收集技术植入城市结构和居民家中的形式：测量空气质量的人造树木、传输交通拥堵信息的街道摄像头和出租车GPS追踪器、识别人行横道上有障碍的人的RFID卡，以及跟踪老年人家中运动的传感器，仅举几例。简而言之，新加坡沉浸在一个密密麻麻的“智能”技术网络中。但智慧城市对谁来说才是智慧的呢？政府如何通过数据收集技术想象并实际制定一座未来的城市，居民如何参与并重新设计这些技术和想象的未来？这些由技术驱动的创造未来的尝试如何塑造现有的社会关系，它们又是如何被塑造的？为了解决这些问题，我提议对新加坡的一个公共住房社区进行民族志研究，追踪居民在日常生活中与之互动的“智能”技术的设计、开发和使用，以及他们产生的数据的社会生活。关于技术及其产生的数据的人类学工作一般采取两种形式之一：对负责设计和开发技术的“精英”的研究(如Kelty 2008)，或现有的社区关系和文化规范如何重塑预先给定的技术(如Miller 2011)。我没有采取传统的方法来研究新加坡的特定社会或种族群体(例如城市规划者或马来新加坡人)，而是将一座城市作为我的研究对象：一个具有不同生活、社会实践和技术的异质空间横切。迅速增加的全球人口比例正在向城市地区迁移。新加坡的案例提供了一种使用传统民族志方法的方法，这些方法试图了解这座城市的日常生活体验，同时也让我超越了对单一群体的研究，并在技术在不同的空间和社会领域传播时追踪正在形成的技术。我的研究结合了住宅现场基于社区的传统民族志方法和通过系统跟踪技术(数据收集智能家居传感器)的物质符号学方法。使用这些相互交织的方法，我试图理解一座城市的未来是如何想象、设计和生活的。该项目的重点显然是，它只选择了一种技术和一个社区来审视这些发展，但却是开放式的，因为它询问了新加坡对城市整体未来的渴望，以及旨在捕捉他们的数据并将其塑造为城市居民模型的技术如何影响居民的日常生活。住房既是新加坡智能国家计划的关键目标，也是社会文化管理的场所。大约90%的公民居住在政府高度监管的公共住宅区。为了促进它所说的“种族和谐”，新加坡政府实施了种族配额，规定区块必须大致反映新加坡人口的种族构成：80%是新加坡华人，15%是马来人，5%是印度人。住房和城市发展局城镇的设计是统一的，并拥有所有必要的便利设施，因此居民没有动力通过在城市中搬家来增加交通系统的负担。由于这些社会、基础设施和技术设计的项目，每一座住宅区都明确地成为新加坡社会整体的一个缩影，因此，我建议在新加坡的一个组屋发展局小镇进行研究，特别是裕廊东部的裕华。余华特别感兴趣。

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