Abstract
Based on a case study conducted in Geylang, Singapore, this article explores the role of urban policing, surveillance and crime control as mechanisms of social ordering that contribute to the marginalisation of excluded groups, including low-income migrant workers and sex workers. Adopting a statecraft approach that emphasises the significance of ‘governing through crime’ for the upholding of urban political-economic projects, we examine the entanglement of political discourses and crime and social control practices as co-constructive of class- and race-based inequality in Singapore. Drawing from qualitative interviews with NGO workers and sex workers, augmented by extensive non-participant observations, we identify three processes through which state power is vectored in Geylang: the stigmatisation of the neighbourhood through association with marginalised groups, legitimising intense spatialised intervention; the enacting of performative zero-tolerance policing; and the containment and surveillance of illicit activities within the neighbourhood. Contributing to discussions that advance the statecraft approach to researching urban crime control, the article shows that seemingly contradictory practices of tolerance and intervention constitute strategies of governance. The article argues that spatially specific crime control practices in Geylang generated an exclusionary ‘spectacle’ which symbolically connects low-income migrant workers with deviance, in turn supporting citizenship exclusion, racialised marginality and a wider politics of capital accumulation resting on disempowered labour. As we argue, crime control policies are an important form of statecraft legitimising an urban political economy that is heavily reliant on low-cost labour provided by migrant workers.
Highlights
Contemporary city economies are increasingly dependent on various forms of immigration to secure profit-generating economic activities, whether it is of hypermobile middle- and upper-class consumer-workers from wealthy regions or low-income labourers from ‘periphery’ countries
Contributing further to the development of the statecraft approach to researching urban crime control, our research focuses on deconstructing the various local processes that contribute to the upholding of raceand class-based inequalities in Singapore
Drawing empirically from observations and the experiences of those living and working in a highly controlled neighbourhood, we demonstrate that the material dimensions of practices managing criminality (Coleman et’al., 2005) in Geylang are fundamentally undergirded by a representational politics
Summary
Contemporary city economies are increasingly dependent on various forms of immigration to secure profit-generating economic activities, whether it is of hypermobile middle- and upper-class consumer-workers from wealthy regions or low-income labourers from ‘periphery’ countries. The political and social ramifications of immigration can have important implications for the stability of cities and harbour the potential to threaten the legitimacy of urban political structures and economic systems. Poorly paid migrants frequently make up the backbone of various industries in cities, enabling certain economic activities dependent on devalued labour. The successful incorporation of migrant-dependent economic activities into the urban political economy requires the institutional management of this contradiction between belonging and exclusion. Mainstream political discourses may, at times, depict immigration as indispensable to the wealth of the city. Immigrants are constructed as unwelcome aliens, even when their presence might only be possible due to clandestine forms of state ‘toleration’
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