Engineering immunity? Biotechnical governance and the experimental failures of Project Wolbachia in Singapore

Abstract

This paper introduces the idea of ‘experimental failure’ to critically interrogate the limits of engineering biological systems for urban governance. Whilst experimentation through projects related to smart cities and eco-cities has garnered significant attention, biotechnical experiments––which manipulate living organisms through technology––remain underexplored. Unlike interventions leveraging non-living, inanimate systems, engineering life must contend with ecological ‘unruliness’ and social uncertainties. These complexities often resist straightforward quantification and exceed conventional evaluation frameworks, demanding a rethinking of what constitutes ‘success’ and ‘failure’ in such interventions. Drawing on ethnographic research with public health officers, pest management professionals and residents in Singapore, we analyse the government-led Project Wolbachia. This intervention engineers urban immunity not by targeting individual biology, but by reshaping the urban ecosystem through the release of mosquitoes. This draws humans, mosquitoes, and Wolbachia bacteria into novel ecological configurations, blurring the boundaries between intervention and coexistence. Yet, this biopolitical vision is disrupted by the very life it seeks to control. Releasing mosquitoes has generated public anxiety and sensory aversion, whilst the ecological adaptability of the mosquitoes has led to unforeseen disruptions. These outcomes reveal a fundamental tension between the technocratic aspiration to engineer stable ecosystems with precision and the indeterminate agencies of living systems. By framing these challenges as ‘experimental failures’, we argue that failure is not an external setback, but is intrinsic to the project of engineering living systems. These failures arise from the entangled dynamics of multispecies relations and broader social and political contexts that exceed the project's original design. Thinking about failure this way not only exposes the limitations of technoscientific approaches to managing ecological unpredictability, but also advances understanding of the partiality and situatedness of biotechnical interventions. Embracing, rather than eliding, failure is vital for a critical understanding of what it means to engineer immunity within urban ecological futures.