Geomorphic eugenics and the engineering of surplus territory

Granular geographies reveal more than the transformation of fluid into solid, of sea into land, as Lowe (2026) aptly demonstrates. The history of territory, in Singapore and elsewhere, is a crucible of a state's desires, fantasies, and anxieties, and, as Lowe argues, the engineering of subjects through anatropism and gender can be revealed through the granular geographies of reclamation and the precincts of political-economic order that they establish for the Singaporean state. Think of the subterranean immersion of district-wide cooling infrastructure pioneered in the granular soil of Marina Bay illustrated by McNeill (2019) as an example of atmospheric engineering for increasing productivity, wiring swathes of the Central Business District into a singular air-conditioning system on land that was reclaimed decades ago with (most likely) Indonesian and Malaysian sand. As Lowe astutely observes, the manipulation of temperature to model ‘temperateness’ conceptually as a way of negating the disadvantageous characteristics of ‘tropicality’ is a strategy that goes back to the initial cartographic mapping of Singapore by colonial agents of the East India Company. Lowe's proposition for exploring the conceptual spaces of granular geography, by virtue of examining the construction of gender through mass conscription, and the role played by sand in the militarization of Pulau Tekong, is that these conceptual spaces are not merely abstract, but are potent representational entities, such as the Marina Bay Sands and its filmic depictions, or the widespread cultural codes and artifacts associated with National Service forming a rite of passage for the male citizen. What subjects are engendered by reclamation, and thus undergirded by a granular geography, will be outlined in this response.

If sand, and the foundation it forms for diverse state-building projects, can ingrain specific thermal and gendered subjects, then the interdependencies infiltrated by sand, in terms of the state's anxieties around population and climate, tempts us to theorize the general conceptual engineering of reclamation as a geomorphic eugenics: the artificial selection of a particular scale of sediment to construct surplus territory to be made productive by a particular kind of racialized and gendered worker who will ultimately not be able to reside, and reproduce, within this territory. Anatropism, as the negation of tropicality, delineates the biopolitical instrumentality of reclamation's conceptual space, alongside its granular foundations, as a covert racial and sexual process of selection that renders territory productive. Furthermore, the process of dredging and mining sand itself relies upon the convective properties of its granular materiality (also called self-segregating), in which a granular system under excitation self-organizes by size: capitalist urbanization and territorial expansion rely upon this self-selecting, self-organizing property of sediment to produce sand as a cheap and abundant resource, with sand surfacing as an ideal and pliant species of sediment amenable to exploitation.

The anatropism that Lowe begins his commentary with has deep roots in the colonization of Singapore by the East India Company, and the colonial taxonomies that mapped race onto climate and labor, potentiating exploitation. The Singaporean artist Charles Lim, whose work excavates the historical and maritime dimensions of Singapore's territorial transformation, included in the 2015 catalog of SEA STATE (produced for the first Singapore Pavilion at the Venice Biennale) an extract from the journal of John Crawfurd, the last Resident of Singapore, detailing a journey around the island of Singapore. Of specific note to us, aside from its status as a historical document of the early colonization of Singapore, are the intermittent remarks on the Indigenous Malay (read: tropical) attitude toward work: a Malay interlocutor, Crawfurd tells us, supposedly states that if mangrove fruit was edible, ‘men might live happily without working’ (Crawfurd, 1825, cited in Lim, 2015: 49). Crawfurd also describes the Orang Laut, seminomadic sea people, as ‘inoffensive in their manners, but like the rest of the race, think it neither sin nor shame to plunder when they can do it with impunity’ (Crawfurd, 1825, cited in Lim, 2015: 49). Elsewhere, we have a less racialized but more explicit colonial dichotomy between the alleged abundance and lassitude of the tropics and the temperate fetish for hard, honest work in another historical document employed by Lim in the SEA STATE project. The Hikayat Abdullah is an autobiographical account by the Malay scholar-traveller Munshi Abdul Kadir who observed the first reclamation of land in Singapore, Boat Quay in 1822, and the argument between Stamford Raffles, the colonial agent lauded for founding Singapore, and William Farquhar, his subordinate. Specifically, the impetus to reclaim Boat Quay, according to Raffles, stemmed from a fear that:

‘[i]f Kampung Gelam was to become the trading site, then this side would be neglected for a hundred years; nothing will ever improve’. Hence, at that moment, the two of them brimmed with ideas. One said this, the other said that, each trying to find a solution. Thus it took three days of them mulling over this matter when it entered into Tuan Raffles’ thoughts that a hill near Tanjung Singapura could be broken up. From which the earth could be used to be made into an embankment for the near side of the river …. Consequently, the next day, men under the orders of both tuans called for Chinese, Malay and Indian coolies. Around two to three hundred coolies; each at one rupee per day. They were ordered to dig up and carry the earth. (Abdul Kadir, 1955: 166)

Though sand, and its granular geographies, have yet to make a fully fleshed appearance at this early stage in Singapore's colonial history, the elements prefigured in this initial transformation of a swamp into a budding commercial district (now abutting the Central Business District) laid the groundwork for the rationale of reclamation to come: the spectral opportunity cost of not constructing land that does not yet exist.

As the reclamations of colonial Singapore became reconfigured as a developmental strategy for postcolonial Singapore, these elements slowly became immersed in sand, and granular geographies retroactively filter back to their genesis in Boat Quay as a consummation of that speculative developmental ideal. As Davies (2021) observes in the swamp reclamations of Recife, the making of solid, reliable, and commercially viable land ingrains the racial division of nature and the consolidation of whiteness through enclosure, purity, and dryness. The reclamation of the coast in Singapore echoes back into the interior, encompassing other racial, sexual, and gendered orders in the interior. The designation of a geomorphic eugenics is a recognition of the city-state's sexual and racial order inscribed through territorial prosthesis; for this surplus territory to be made productive, gendered and racialized migrant labor (for urban and infrastructural development as well as social reproduction), is required to function, albeit segregated legally and often spatially within the city-state from other categories of citizen and permanent resident as I have described elsewhere (Jamieson, 2022). The structural demand for specific scales and varieties of cheap and limitless sediment is mirrored in a structural reliance on disavowal and disposable laboring subjects that are denied the possibility of living (and reproducing) in the city-state beyond what their work permits allow. The dual masculinization and militarization of territory achieved through Tekong not only draws gender within the conceptual space of reclamation, but folds in wider concerns around population that links this territorial strategy explicitly with the specter of eugenics that has dogged the city-state's management of population.

In Global City Futures, Oswin (2019) elaborates upon the city-state's political technologies of desire and sexuality that are intimately bound to racial governance, the state-controlled land market, and its renowned public housing program. The city-state's urban development is intertwined with its ‘reproductive futurism’, whose undercurrent is the government's recurrent anxiety and flirtation with overt and covert forms of eugenics. Amrith's analysis of various policies undertaken by the Singaporean government under Lee Kuan Yew, building upon the racial hierarchy established by the British, reveals attempts to explicitly shape the population by introducing an abortion and voluntary sterilization bill to ‘increase the quality of the population’ in 1969; in 1984, this eugenic management then intensified toward giving graduate mothers tax breaks to incentivize middle class population growth, with the explicit intention of minimizing working class birth rates and maximizing middle class birth rates (Amrith, 2010: 361). While these policies proved to be unpopular, and a specific obsession of the founding Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew, subsequent policies around the draconian management of migrant labor follow along these eugenic lines (Barr, 1999). Migrant workers, who fill the gap in poorly paid, onerous work in construction, industry, and social reproduction and have typically been denied the possibility of residence, are contrasted with high-skilled ‘foreign talent’, who are eventually allowed to settle in Singapore (Barr, 1999; Yeoh, 2006). Thus, eugenics as an explicit policy can be abandoned if it is pursued by other means, and normalized as an incidental outcome of the labor market.

The state-led housing program ties in multiple threads of governance and planning, from the obvious considerations in terms of urban development and land use to the implications this holds for the regulation of the construction market and raw materials (including imported concreting sand and permits for migrant construction workers, among other rudiments), to broader considerations around rates of population growth and the desire to provide heterosexual couplings the means to produce the next generation of citizens. Alongside these, the state-managed Central Provident Fund, a mandatory social security savings program that citizens pay into and is accessed by the government at its discretion, out of which citizens pay the down payment for their apartment to the HDB directly, as well as their mortgage, obviates the need for ulterior financial intermediaries, forming a ‘closed loop’ (Chua, 2014). This closed loop extends beyond the financial and encompasses the territorial as well; as sand imports have become more precarious, the recycling of soil excavated from construction and infrastructure projects as reclamation infill has risen to fill in the gap in provision. While less ideal of a material to reclaim land with, owing to its more problematic consolidation and ‘messier’ properties than purely granular infill like sand, it has been employed as a cost and space-saving measure; otherwise, more sand would have to be procured, likely at higher prices, and precious land would be wasted disposing of these tonnes of earth. Given how large of a land developer the state already is, the synergies are obvious – a closed loop could be created between the housing market and the land reclamation program. Thus, further efficiencies were wrought in the management of population and territory, but new vulnerabilities surfaced; exogenous economic shocks that could slow the housing market could also threaten the vital timelines of reclamation projects. The suspension of ordinary spatial constraints through the development of surplus territory forms a system that requires anxious coordination. The specter of surplus territory, which encompasses Singapore's granular geographies, ensnares the state's anxieties around population growth, and thus the need for certain gendered and thermal subjects that can align with their scrupulous management. Return to Lowe's insight onto the granular geographies of Tekong and the conceptual masculinization ingrained and grounded by the transnational sand trade: while this masculinization is founded on the asymmetry between Singapore and its upstream sources of sand, like Koh Kong, Cambodia, imposing upon rural communities and disproportionately upon women in particular, it is also founded upon the erasure of Singapore's own coastal history.

Pulau Tekong, like many islands across Singapore, was inhabited, its population swelling to around 4000 people at its height in the postwar period. And like many others, Tekong's inhabitants were uprooted in the drive for modernization and militarization. Some of their histories are recollected in a handful of books and articles (Lee and Chen, 2011). Agriculture was prevalent throughout the villages scattered across the island, with rubber plantations predominating, alongside some coconut plantations, as well as vegetable and tobacco farms. When Lee Kuan Yew visited in 1972, he proclaimed that within the next 10 to 12 years the island would become a military or industrial base and that the islanders could lead a better life on the main island. By the end of the 1980s, the island was depopulated, with the islanders resettled on Singapore Island, which coincidentally had a different name. Before it came to be known as Singapore, the island that hosted the settlement of Temasek was known as Pulau Ujong, the Island at the End, so called because Singapore was at the furthest end of continental Asia. The history of modern Singapore can be evinced through these names rewritten, erased, and agglomerated; even the contemporary Pulau Tekong has sunk several other smaller islands into its expanded coastline through previous reclamations; Pulau Tekong Kechil (Little Tekong Island), Pulau Sajahat, and a handful of others.

Given Singapore's strategic position, paired with the hopeless task of its defense in the event of an invasion, the apparent premium placed on national defense belies another kind of desire entirely. The military itself is a mise en abyme for society. Subjects, be they gendered or racialized, economic or geophysical, are brought to a precise, regimented order. The practice of logistics that has reordered the global economy in the wake of the Second World War, and was critical for the globalization of production (as well as Singapore's transition from colonial entrepot to global city), originated on the battlefield, but quickly became adapted to the vaster circulatory demands of commerce. Remarking on the hidden history of logistics folded within histories of chattel slavery, Stefano Harney observes: ‘what is called surveillance might also be pre-emptive logistics’ (Cuppini, Frapporti, and Harney, 2018: 97, italics in original). The deployment of sand and its granular properties – in concert with other, less ideal, materials – enables an ideal system of land use and development by the state, through which it folds in its other strategies, forming a dependable foundation for speculation and revision such new land affords for the overall Master Plan and the management of its subjects.

The self-iterating grain of sand as a resource is the geomorphic correlate of capitalist urbanization. There are other human-made artifacts of geomorphology, but none so wonderfully compliant with engineering formulas for constructing land as this self-segregating, self-selecting, nearly eugenic species of sediment. To then resist the specter of the self-replicating, self-valorising, geomorphic eugenics of sand as a resource, granular geographies trace those many journeys and trajectories traced in sand, and here through these small smattering of islands that became the city-state of Singapore. A surplus is something in excess of requirements: a temperate climate one degree north of the equator, a share of value wrought over and above the worker's ability to reproduce himself (for we are thinking of the ideally gendered and conscripted citizen here), and the land that would otherwise be lost were it not for its inconceivable gain which could be achieved through reclamation.