Lion City Zoopolis: Urban Crittizenship in Biophilic Singapore

ABSTRACT

A central theme of Singapore’s “City in Nature” vision is framed through biophilic urbanism, or efforts to harmonize biodiversity and urban development through built, social, and political design. The central discourses of Singapore’s biophilic urbanism have revolved around flora-centric paradigms, including habitat conservation, greening spaces, and access to natural capital. This paper detours from conventions of Singapore’s urban ecological futures and instead explores the governance of fauna co-existence in the city–state through the concept of “urban crittizenship.” Defined as a more-than-human denization framework that interrogates urban wildlife governance, urban crittizenship interrogates the politics of urban wildlife’s rights to the city. Drawing on interviews, publicly accessible data, and ethnographic findings with local governing actors and activists, I show that Singapore’s experience of urban fauna governance is framed through three categories (“resident,” “wildlife,” and “pest”) and that they inform how state and society mediate and manage coexistence with urban wildlife. These experiences are examined through the examples of otters, boars, and pigeons, respectively. In doing so, I present urban crittizenship as an inductive model of analyzing urban wildlife coexistence as primarily secured through infrastructural and political regime configurations that inform their crittizenship statuses. Any real shifts toward new forms of coexistence must therefore begin with actual transformations in these areas. I further iterate that using an urban crittizenship framework refines our understanding and application of biophilic urbanism as socio-political processes that influence already-existing urban wildlife coexistence, complementing existing analyses in urban ecology. In other words, there is a politics of biophilia that warrants a conversation, because biophilia is political.

KEYWORDS:

• Biophilic urbanism
• human–animal interaction
• Singapore
• urban coexistence
• urban ecology
• urban wildlife

Acknowledgements

The author thanks members of the workshop hosted by the Asia Research Institute (ARI) titled “Green Cities Beyond Failure: Toward Hopeful Epistemologies of Ecological Urban Futures in Asia” for their insightful suggestions, as well as the opportunity to present a working version of the paper on 4 August 2022. The author also thanks the two anonymous reviewers and Editor-in-Chief Dr. Anthony L Podberscek of Anthrozoös for their constructive feedback.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.