Migrant worker recreational centres, accidental diversities and new relationalities in Singapore

Abstract

How best to integrate migrant workers in host societies has been a longstanding question in the study of migration and globalisation. Scholars have been conceptualising new modes of transnational mobilities that point to the politics of differential inclusion to address encounters between migrants and locals in Asian global cities. This article uses an instructive case study of temporary, low-wage male migrant workers in Singapore and the issue of their recreational spaces to show that the politics of inclusion/exclusion are layered onto the question of integration/segregation. We take integration to mean the incorporation of migrants into local society to give full access to social institutions of protection and care, and inclusion to refer to the acceptance of migrants into social relationships that define urban life. Segregation and exclusion are their respective corollaries. We focus on state-provisioned recreation centres sited near the dormitories, which were expanded to function as segregating spaces to keep migrant workers away from the city after the Little India riot in 2013. We show that they have instead become contact zones producing accidental diversities of urban encounters between migrants, locals and state-linked agents. We discuss how these contact zones have developed differently across the centres built before and after the riot, the transformation of the accidental diversities in the recreational centres by state-linked agents into a new migrant grassroots sector and the ongoing intensification of this during the COVID-19 pandemic. The new relationalities offer the promise of transcending the layered binaries of integration/segregation and inclusion/exclusion.