Reclaiming Resilience Through Granular Arbitrage: Anticipating Sea Level Rise in Singapore

Introduction

In his 2019 National Day Rally speech, then-Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong described the threat of sea level rise to Singapore alongside its ultimate mitigation, land reclamation.¹ Low-lying coastal areas, particularly downtown and along the east coast, will be underwater by 2100, based on projections of around four meters of sea level rise. The solution the Prime Minister presented for this problem was the reclamation of land from the sea, part bulwark against rising tides and part development opportunity. However, unlike many other small island states, land reclamation has been a core part of Singapore’s urban and political-economic developmental strategy for the past sixty years. Independent Singapore has transformed land reclamation from an opportunistic tool for siting ports and industry to an intrinsic mechanism of its model of governance. Since independence, land reclamation has been consistently deployed to not only solve the obvious spatial constraints such a small island state faces, but to function as a flexible puzzle piece around which its urban and economic planning coheres. And now it appears that it will be brought into alignment with an array of other strategies which aim to make Singapore resilient in the face of rising sea levels. While the state framed previous land reclamation projects in the context of Singapore’s political and economic vulnerability as a small island state with precious little space or natural resources,² the rationales deployed were mostly economic or developmental, with occasional projects framed as enhancing the city-state’s overall security objectives. The public shift toward climate change resilience as the rationale for reclamation makes it an intriguing aperture through which urban resilience can be interrogated. I posit resilience as both an epistemological and ideological manoeuvre that functions by demarcating what is to be made resilient and what is not, often incorporating natural systems as infrastructures of some kind. This demarcation enables planners to expand their conception of urban systems to the natural world, as well as exclude those processes which undermine the premise of resilience. Enactments of urban resilience often focus upon the instrumentalization of natural systems as infrastructure, crafting landscapes that are symptomatic of resilience fetishism.

I pay special attention to how the deployment of resilience in this instance intersects with Singapore’s land reclamation project and concomitant reliance on imported sand. I illuminate how resilience’s mobilization transforms territory and sovereignty in the Anthropocene through the concept of granular arbitrage, and discuss how Singapore’s singular territorial condition might influence kindred visions for the expansion of territory and urbanization amidst the rise of sea levels.³ John Smith, in his comprehensive and convincing account of imperialism as a global political and economic phenomenon in the twenty-first century, introduces labor arbitrage as a key concept for understanding the globalization of production.⁴ The term “arbitrage” is ordinarily used to denote the advantageous difference in prices for the same commodity in two different markets. Initially developed by labor economist Stephen Roach, labor arbitrage boils down to the “the substitution of relatively high-wage workers in imperialist countries with low-wage workers in China, Bangladesh, and other nations in the Global South.”⁵ As a resource, sand is characterized by its low production costs and high volume, with its price primarily determined by transportation costs. Of interest to me are the transnational sand markets of Southeast Asia, where sediment has been persistently undervalued in coastal, estuarine, and riverine contexts and shifted in immense volumes to resource Singapore’s territorial expansion, transformed through its commodity chain into the geophysical expression of Singapore's sovereignty and the fulcrum of urban planning. In this article, I focus on the extractive and territorial dimensions of Singapore’s governance by proposing granular arbitrage as an emerging phenomenon through which urban models will render themselves “resilient” against sea level rise, at the detriment of coastal and riverine systems elsewhere.

Singapore’s reclamation project has notoriously relied upon an opaque and often ecologically disastrous transnational sand trade,⁶ its demand for sand prefiguring the emergence of a global sand crisis.⁷ As controversies around sand imports have mounted over the past two decades, the Singapore government has put considerable effort into funding methods of attenuating its appetite for imported sand.⁸ This has not, however, tempered its plans for vast reclamation projects which stoke this immense demand.

The concept of “urban resilience” has been promulgated by networks of NGOs, consultants, and multilateral organizations such as the World Bank, creating a global market for the development and implementation of solutions, programs, and assessment tools to foster urban resilience.⁹ The stretching of urban resilience to simultaneously encompass “climate change adaptation … disaster risk reduction” and “security and sustainability priorities” poses considerable difficulties to its conceptual definition.¹⁰ Dismissing this as an ideological conceit that offers no epistemological traction on urbanization in the Anthropocene seems tempting.¹¹ But the conceptual turbidity of urban resilience can demarcate the fault lines of urban and territorial statecraft amidst the planetary uncertainties engendered by climate change, and attempts by city planners and governments to not only accommodate this uncertainty, but operationalize it. Thus, although the concept of urban resilience is an ideological construct, it allows us to grasp how urban and territorial configurations are produced under these conditions, and the kinds of political subjects that emerge from these configurations.

In what follows I theorize urban resilience through the urban and territorial reconfigurations of Singapore’s land reclamation project to explicitly mitigate sea level rise, and the subsequent transformation of its granular geographies. I do so by using the concept of granular arbitrage to situate the structural features of the transnational sand trade that has resourced Singapore’s land reclamation project as a process of unequal ecological and economic exchange reliant on sand’s dysfunctional construction as a resource. Although in this case the Singapore government insists that it is minimizing sand imports through all available means, the sheer scale of future reclamation projects ensures that vast amounts of imported sand will be required to ensure the integrity of reclaimed land. This is especially salient as one of the largest looming plans for reclamation is the Long Island land project, an eight-hundred-hectare expansion of the east coast that will act as both a sea wall and reservoir for the district, and which I focus on as a case study for examining how plans for resilience are forged on ecologically unequal foundations. Around 240 million metric tons of infill material will be required just to complete the Long Island reclamation.¹²

I begin by outlining the diverse role that land reclamation has played in the political, economic, and urban development of Singapore. I then discuss the concept of resilience, its genealogy and mutation into urban resilience, and how its epistemological and ideological dimensions reveal fundamental anxieties in urban governance. Following this, I examine tentative plans for the Long Island reclamation scheme and the landscapes envisioned for Long Island as an instantiation of resilience fetishism.

Reclamation and the accumulation of surplus territory

The reclamation of land from the sea has been Singapore’s principal method of geographic expansion, as reclamation became a multifarious and flexible development tool for the Singapore government that could complement its formidable system of land use.¹³

Initial reclamation projects along the city-state’s east coast, beginning in 1966, were designed to resettle coastal villagers in newly built Housing Development Board (HDB) estates, with this coastal land in turn developed for various public housing projects, such as Marine Parade.¹⁴ Swampland and coastlines to the west in Jurong, were reclaimed for critical industries in the 1980s. This included a swathe of offshore islands which were allotted to various petrochemical multinationals to house their facilities.¹⁵ Later reclamation expanded in scope, such as the Changi and Jurong Island projects for the development of Singapore’s international airport and a petrochemical refining and storage complex, respectively. Marina Bay, another reclamation project, ultimately became the centrepiece of Singapore’s global city aspirations in the Marina Bay Sands and the Gardens by the Bay.

However, land reclamation has been beset by controversies and tensions surrounding sand imports. The sand trade has a tendency towards opacity, corruption, and elite capture.¹⁶ In addition, the transnational sand trade of Southeast Asia, uniquely driven by Singapore’s capacious demand, has resulted in socioecological devastation for coasts and river systems.¹⁷ Since 1989, Singapore has imported over 940 million of tons of sand.¹⁸ This total excludes tons rumored to have been imported via a black-market sand trade between Singapore and parts of Malaysia and Indonesia.¹⁹ Controversies like Malaysia’s “sex for sand” scandal, in which Malaysian officials were bribed with sex workers to authorize sand exports to Singapore, and the dredging of Pulau Nipah in Indonesia, which threatened to erode an island that comprised Indonesia’s maritime border with Singapore, exemplify both the corruption and the opacity of dredging in the transnational sand markets of Southeast Asia.²⁰

Singapore’s demand for sand has been so intense that it has created export markets where none existed before, such as in Cambodia. Prior to 2007, Cambodia had almost no sand exports to speak of, with total exports between 2002 and 2006 worth less than $US 35,000.²¹ By 2007 exports had jumped to nearly US$ 2.5 million, followed by a massive leap to over US$ 110 million the following year. According to investigative NGO Global Witness, Singapore appeared to be the main destination for these exports, with around 3.8 million tons exported to Singapore in 2008.²² Most of this trade was conducted by private dredging companies, with no official agreement between the two governments for sand exports. However, the Global Witness investigation revealed sand mining permits issued by the Royal Government of Cambodia that had the signature and official stamp of Singapore’s Ambassador to Phnom Penh, indicating some degree of complicity that the Singapore government has persistently denied.²³ Sand dredging for export in Cambodia was marked by elite capture, as conglomerates owned by (and named after) Ly Yong Phat and Mong Reththy, politicians in the ruling Cambodian People’s Party, were handed sand mining concessions. Dredging often took place in ecologically protected areas, or exceeded the limits prescribed by environmental impact assessments, leading to local outcries over the effects of excessive dredging, with the government responding by issuing limited bans on sand mining, which would then be overturned or ignored months afterwards. The confusion sowed by the Cambodian government’s erratic banning and unbanning of sand exports helped facilitate dredging, alongside the general impunity of the politically connected tycoons who owned the concessions. Protests against dredging, and even photographing it, resulted in harsh crackdowns and jail sentences. Sand exports to Singapore only became problematic once Mother Nature Cambodia, an environmental activist group, began working with communities in Koh Kong and mounted a social media campaign. Increased international attention prompted the Singapore government to ban Cambodian sand imports at the end of 2016. In 2018, Cambodian-American filmmaker Kalyanee Mam produced a documentary entitled, “Lost World” that explicitly linked Singapore’s reclamation project with the worst excesses of dredging in Cambodia. While not tempering the city-state’s appetite for geographic expansion, the controversy placed sand in the public consciousness and the city-state’s limits of discourse, becoming more frequent in government communications as a vulnerability Singapore was in the process of mitigating.

For the most part, the ecological cost of sand mining is hidden in sparsely populated hinterlands, affecting mostly coastal and riverine fishers and their communities. The direct effects of sand mining upon coastlines and river systems are difficult to discern without having determined baselines for geomorphology and sediment transport prior to mining, which, coupled with the opacity and corruption that manifests in the hottest sand markets, obscures the overall cost of the sand trade. The preponderance of extra-economic and extra-legal methods of securing the flow of sand can be seen in other regions of intense urbanization, such as India. Lucia Michelutti has used the concept of a mafia assemblage to describe the shifting but not fully fluid criminal elements that control the sand markets across India, as well as facilitate the interstate sand trade.²⁴ This mafia assemblage cultivates its predatory economic control by “searching for impunity” where the gains of illegal activity are then used to fund and/or launder legitimate activities which create legitimacy for local economic and political actors.²⁵ Similarly, Frank Müller’s analysis of sand markets in Rio de Janeiro controlled by militias reveals how these militias are deeply embedded in urban development and politics.²⁶ The low-value high-volume nature of sand as a resource often results in markets being captured by local or regional political and economic elites, thus reinforcing local power asymmetries, which expand the repertoire for extra-economic techniques for securing supplies of sand.²⁷

Numerous bans on sand imports, beginning with the government of Malaysia in 1997 (though not enforced until 2003), Indonesia in 2007, and more recently Cambodia and Vietnam in 2017, prompted the Singapore government to investigate alternatives. These range from blending soft clay and excavated soil with stabilizing layers of sand to reduce the amount of sand required to reclaim land (though still requiring sufficient quantities to construct viable, load-bearing land), to recent experiments with polders, in which a sea wall is dredged and constructed above sea level, reducing (but not negating) the need for infill which requires constant maintenance to keep the reclaimed land drained. More novel approaches, such as the development of granular construction materials from incineration bottom ash²⁸ are intriguing, but in the early stages of research and development, and offer little prospect of being able to scale sufficiently to address the reliance on imported sand. Underground development may be a less problematic frontier for expansion, though it poses serious issues in terms of economic costs, potential risks in dense urban environments, and a lack of adaptability of underground development compared to surface development. Individual projects are recurrently justified on the basis of land scarcity, which does little to clarify the persistence of geographic expansion, and land reclamation in particular, as a development strategy.

The purpose of reclamation and other strategies of geographic expansion is to produce territory for specific uses, such as the reclamation of Changi for the expansion of the airport. In other cases, land is reclaimed to concentrate particular uses on less valuable land, and free up more valuable land elsewhere, such as the reclamation of Pulau Tekong to relocate military bases and free up land for redevelopment. Sometimes both purposes are fulfilled through one project as is the case with the Tuas Megaport project, which will in one fell swoop expand the capacity of Singapore as a container port from fifty to sixty-five million twenty-foot equivalent units, as well as free up existing centrally located ports for redevelopment.

Reclamation is an expression of the government’s power to surpass the limits of nature, a powerful ideological move through which it creates new space,²⁹ and a method of crafting new geographies through which the city-state’s political economy can graft itself to emerging trends in the global economy. This consistent geographic expansion has become a critical component of Singapore’s economic and urban planning. Akin to the Marxian notion of surplus value, the accumulation of surplus territory depends on a granular arbitrage in which the unequal ecological exchange inherent to the sand trade is leveraged for the accumulation of territory that can guarantee that a range of speculative plans can become reality. Future projects, such as the Long Island reclamation project (see below), reflect a reformulation Singapore’s approach to land reclamation as a means of achieving resilience amidst rising sea levels.

Singapore’s resilient turn in urban planning and governance is reflected in the output of the Center for Liveable Cities (CLC), a government agency within the Ministry of Sustainability and Environment. Singapore is framed by the CLC as resilient because of its ability to absorb and mitigate both shocks (such as natural disasters, infrastructural failures, political instability, terrorism, economic volatility, and pandemics) and stresses (a declining birth rate, aging population, resource scarcity, and global economic, climatic, and political uncertainties).³⁰ The government has depicted climate change as the ultimate risk, requiring, according to former Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, “defenses like we treat SAF [Singapore Armed Forces] … everything else must bend the knee to safeguard our island nation.”³¹ The government has identified sea level rise mitigation with the construction of “polders, dykes, and seawalls” as well as “barrier islands connected with barrages that would not only protect the coast but provide new water reservoirs and recreational spaces.”³² It has also identified “nature-based solutions” and efforts to preserve “green carbon.”³³ Other mitigation measures announced by Lee Hsien Loong in 2019 include enhanced drainage infrastructure and the construction of new reservoirs, which are supposed to act as a buffer against sea level rise as well as enhance water resilience.³⁴

As these plans show, reclamation enables far more than the simple increase of land. It leverages an entire suite of tools and mechanisms for enhancing different modes of resilience. Self-conscious of the extent to which the hardening of the coast has come at the cost of coastal ecology and biodiversity, planners and bureaucrats are keen to stress that Long Island and other future coastal defense strategies will conscientiously incorporate nature and “nature-based solutions.” This is also the result of emerging strategies through which natural assets can be capitalized in terms of their ability to offset climate change by sequestering carbon. The extent to which these nature-based solutions succeed depends on how well the valuation of nature translates to the financialization of nature, with forests, mangroves, and estuarine environments becoming sites for green and blue carbon sequestration and offsetting.³⁵

Urbanizing resilience

The framing of the government’s land reclamation projects as a response to rising sea levels demonstrates considerable continuity with reclamation as a development paradigm. Sea level rise is simply the latest and best ideological camouflage for the production of surplus territory. However, the reformulation of land reclamation from a development panacea into a crucible to forge a more resilient Singapore represents an opportunity to examine the deployment of resilience as a practice of urban governance.

Ecologist C.S. Holling in 1973 described resilience as a “measure of the persistence of systems and of their ability to absorb change and disturbance and still maintain the same relationships between populations or state variables.”³⁶ Hollings developed this concept from a variety of case studies which addressed the human management of ecosystems towards commercial ends, such as salmon fishing and logging.³⁷ He used “resilience” to describe ecosystems which were disrupted through instabilities and heterogeneities, but preserved their structure. According to Hollings, a system’s resilience is based on its ability to navigate fluctuations, instabilities, and changing variables; in effect, its ability to tolerate non-equilibrium dynamics and uncertainties. This coincided with the development of cybernetics and systems theory, in which the idea of “management under conditions of irreducible, non-probabilistic uncertainty … catalyzed many of resilience’s interdisciplinary connections.”³⁸ Rather than precluding uncertainty, it could be internalized, enabling a system to become more adaptable in the face of a potential crisis.³⁹

Resilience has not been limited to a mode of urban governance; it is also found across multiple disciplines and fields, such as energy systems, engineering, risk management, international development, security, and planning.⁴⁰ The Stockholm Resilience Center has been particularly influential in proliferating resilience as an epistemology with its “planetary boundaries” concept, which defines relatively stable (but not necessarily equilibrium) limits for the earth system⁴¹ to define what it calls a “safe operating space for humanity.”⁴² Resilience does not ensure stability of all interlinked systems but outlines the zone in which the systems may be reproduced in spite of disruption:

Resilience is the capacity of a system, be it an individual, a forest, a city, or an economy, to deal with change and continue to develop. It is about how humans and nature can use shocks and disturbances like a financial crisis or climate change to spur renewal and innovative thinking.⁴³

Implied in this vision is a certain interoperability between “an individual, a forest, a city, or an economy.”⁴⁴

Resilience emphasizes system processes over and above the elements that make up a system and managing those processes in such a way that they preserve their overall function despite shocks and stresses. Resilient systems have in-built redundancies, or various kinds of surpluses, to ensure they remain adaptive.⁴⁵ Hollings described an adaptive cycle comprised of front and back loops, with the former constituting a stable growth cycle and the latter constituting a destabilizing yet open-ended cycle.⁴⁶ Wakefield argues that if the front loop constitutes the hard infrastructures and rigid systems of high modernism, we are now living through the back loop of the Anthropocene, with resilience a space of experimentation and potential contestation, in which the laboratory:

… is not a pristine or sterile space but rather the urban environment itself, an expanded field in which old boundaries and limits are removed and innovation, imagination, and daring are not only considered essential tools for design but also for urban survival.⁴⁷

But what if a system’s front loop and back loop are distended across time and space? What if the disorder of the back loop could be cleaved, or at least displaced, from its experimental potential? What if the sedimentary foundation of resilience against sea level rise can be secured through the blunt demands of market forces, allowing an urban system to productively experiment with a range of resilience initiatives, while the upstream source of this sediment is left with the disorder? In the shadows of resilience lies its conception of a system, what constitutes that system, and the demarcation between what lies inside and outside the system.

“The city as a laboratory” is a recurrent trope in the theorization of urban interventions around sustainability and resilience, and has become a model for standardizing and categorizing various modes of intervention and experimentation,⁴⁸ similar to the “demo or die” logic of smart city governance elaborated by Halpern and Mitchell.⁴⁹ Intrinsic to the extension of the laboratory to the urban is the negotiation of control and contingency, and the designation of urban spaces and processes as zones of experimentation and the circumstances under which this partitioning occurs.⁵⁰ Following Hurricane Sandy’s destruction in New York City in 2012, the unforeseen vulnerability of New York to environmental risks prompted a discursive shift from what Stephanie Wakefield described as “brittle and non-dynamic” approaches to flood protection which dichotomized city and nature towards “modular and interlaced designs … bringing nature, specifically water, back into the city.”⁵¹ A discursive emphasis on complexity and non-equilibrium states characteristic of earlier systems-theory conceptions of resilience predominated in reflections on Hurricane Sandy in the US media and in the city government, with the crisis ultimately prompting experiments to foster resilience amidst greater environmental uncertainty. Resilience emerged as a discourse through which prior eras of planning and engineering approaches could be critiqued for their inability to accommodate nature. Sociotechnical hybridity became prized in the realms of urban risk mitigation, through initiatives like the Living Breakwaters project, in which breakwaters were constructed to accommodate marine habitats, as well as the related Billion Oysters project, which aims to artificially cultivate oyster beds to mitigate wave force and erosion. Projects such as these exemplify the tendency to infrastructuralize nature to engender resilience,⁵² an illustration of resilience fetishism. The tendency for oysters to form reefs by attaching to each other was imagined by bureaucratic agencies and landscape architects to hold the key to creating a lively nature-based solution to storm surges and led to the creation of two miles of artificial reef.⁵³ While Wakefield focuses on the biopolitical dimension of the project, and stresses the multiple, contradictory ways that practitioners attempted to make oysters “lively,” the harnessing of oysters to infrastructuralize also speaks to the operation of resilience fetishism, whereby specific features of ecosystems are instrumentalized to exhibit certain properties, including choreographed performances of nature, while in the process undergoing a rigorous process of selection, engineering and valuation to become financialized and commodified assets, thereby personifying the forces which produce it as natural.

Most critical analyses of resilience theorize the term in broadly discursive terms, as a form of governmentality that brings together a range of practices, utterances, structures, and habits that accord to neoliberal conceptions of governance.⁵⁴ What these discursive conceptions of resilience often elide are the particular ways in which interdisciplinary connections become systematized through the enactment of resilience, and the (re)production of nature and landscape operationalized through this enactment. Thus, resilience fetishism can account for the ways in which certain features of an urban model are rendered “resilient” while others are displaced, obscured, or sequestered.

For Marx, the sinister maneuver of commodity fetishism was that in a capitalist mode of production labor is replaced as the determinate relation of the social structure by commodities.⁵⁵ In like manner, for resilience fetishism, urban governance assumes the fantastic form of a relation between urban and natural systems strictly within the limits of a city. While not perfectly analogous, the landscapes envisioned by these projects of resilience portray a particular, fetishized form of nature that can be incorporated into the urban laboratory and harmonize the contradictions of urban development by becoming “resilient”— that is, made amenable to greater instrumentalization and adaptation to maintain the viability (and productivity) of urban models in the Anthropocene.

In the shadow of Long Island

Sea level rise, and the necessity that Singapore become resilient in the face of climate change, has prompted curious shifts in the attitudes of bureaucrats and urban planners towards nature as a frontier of manipulation and optimisation. This has led to a feasibility study, scheduled to begin in late 2024, for the Long Island reclamation project, which was first outlined in the 1991 Urban Redevelopment Authority Concept Plan.⁵⁶ In some plans, Long Island is depicted as a barrier island, stretching the length of the east coast. In others, it is depicted as a simple extension of the land that is already there. There are plans for a reservoir, increasing the nation’s potable water, as well as for a more basic sea wall, an option that is currently being proffered by government agencies as the least desirable outcome.⁵⁷ After years of existing as a hypothetical project, recent news articles have announced that the Urban Redevelopment Authority is in the process of conducting technical studies and public consultations.⁵⁸Absent some widespread backlash in the coming election year, there is little doubt that this project will go ahead in some form. While the plans for Long Island are far from settled, the still-speculative Long Island project is ripe for analysis as a prominent reclamation project, as it will disrupt the everyday life of densely inhabited neighborhoods and erase one of the most popular leisure destinations in Singapore, East Coast Park. From the statements of politicians and policymakers, nature-based solutions to enhance resilience and biodiversity appear likely candidates to be enrolled in the project, and are prime expressions of resilience fetishism, thus making Long Island a productive site for speculation upon how resilience intersects with other practices of territory and urbanization.

Over the past few decades, Singapore’s east coast has become a desirable district, filled with gentrified neighborhoods dotted with fashionable boutiques and brunch spots in converted shophouses. In former Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong’s 2019 National Day Rally speech, the message was clear: if Long Island is not built, the east coast from the city center to Changi Airport will be vulnerable to sea level rise (Figures 1 & 2). In 2011, the government increased the height of reclaimed land to four meters above sea level in anticipation of further rising sea levels and tropical storm surges that already occasionally overwhelm the city’s drainage infrastructure.⁵⁹ Reclamation projects for critical infrastructure, such as Tuas Megaport and Changi Terminal Five, are being sited five meters above sea level. However, these developments are at odds with the media fanfare surrounding the polder reclamation method, which protects reclaimed land below existing sea levels with dikes and continuous pumping to prevent groundwater seepage and infiltration.⁶⁰

The proposed plans for Long Island, still in the consultation stage, reveal the government’s self-conception of this next phase of its territorial expansion more than other ongoing or planned reclamation projects, given its proximity to densely populated and desirable neighborhoods and the inevitable but as-of-yet unstated impact on property values. Other reclamation projects, either offshore, such as Pulau Tekong, or out of public sight in the industrial and infrastructural hinterland, such as Changi Bay, which began in the latter half of 2023, have received no in-depth public consultation or media coverage. For instance, the environmental impact assessment for the Changi Bay project, which will reclaim 900 hectares, 100 more than what is planned for Long Island, was only accessible for a two-week period in 2022, with the proviso that the 550-page report had to be viewed in person and by appointment at the Housing Development Board (HDB) headquarters in Toa Payoh.⁶¹ It is no accident that nature-based solutions for sea level rise are being proposed for Long Island, given that its construction will destroy the most popular beach in Singapore, while the reclamation of Changi Bay, which will destroy a foreshore that recovered much of its biodiversity after the initial Changi reclamation, features none of this consideration. The concept designs for Long Island on the Urban Redevelopment Authority website focus on planned recreational amenities, biodiversity, and housing, mirroring the first reclamation projects along the east coast.⁶² These first reclamations were driven by high modernist planning principles, prioritizing public housing and the creation of a public beach park, while the proposals for Long Island betray the contemporary preoccupations of urban designers to instrumentalize nature to achieve (and perhaps more importantly personify as a fetish of) resilience.⁶³

However, the space for these possible measures for enabling resilience is constrained by Singapore’s history of reclamation and existing coastal hardening. Over ninety percent of the country’s mangrove forests were destroyed during the coastal development that took place from 1966 onwards, while intertidal flats, sea grasses, reefs, and other marine habitats have been destroyed (sometimes twice over) in recent reclamation projects.⁶⁴ The rise in popularity of nature-based solutions has coincided with efforts by Singapore conservation groups to preserve remaining coastal habitats, such as the mangrove forest of Chek Jawa on the island of Pulau Ubin in 2001,⁶⁵ and a growing body of literature on the comparatively large amounts of carbon mangroves sequester.⁶⁶ Aside from their ability to capture carbon, mangroves are also unique for their ability to thrive in intertidal zones while also providing some level of wave reduction and mitigation of erosion.⁶⁷ Given this intersection of sea level rise mitigation and carbon sequestration, mangroves are prime for inclusion in the financialization of climate change.⁶⁸ While details on the range of nature-based solutions to be adopted in the Long Island project are scarce, Urban Redevelopment Authority officials have indicated that the incorporation of mangroves into the Long Island project is being investigated.⁶⁹ Multiple research projects on mangroves as a mitigator of sea level rise and a method of carbon sequestration have been funded with National Research Foundation grants,⁷⁰ by university research centers,⁷¹ and in concert with initiatives undertaken by the Ministry of National Development.⁷² Ranging from capturing the existing scope and ecosystems services of mangroves in Singapore, to the piloting of hybrid gray-green solutions such as mangrove retaining walls, and planting new mangroves, this research and development focus on “nature-based solutions” merits investigation as a resilience fetish.

Mangroves have become a prime locus of epistemological control for the government, to be taxonomized and hybridized with hard mitigations to infrastructuralize nature. On Pulau Tekong, 13,500 mangrove saplings were planted to test the viability of mass planting, and their integration with protective slopes that would protect them from harsher currents. Mangrove saplings have also been planted at Kranji Coastal Nature Park to mitigate coastal erosion as well. Pulau Ubin, an island off the northern coast of Singapore where mangroves were slated for destruction in the 2000s, is now the site of an expansive mangrove and coastal restoration project spearheaded by civil society and conservation groups. These restored mangroves have become an exemplary case study for planners in the Urban Redevelopment Authority and Singapore’s National Parks Board to draw upon for not simply conservation but instrumentalization. Civil society and conservation groups, by protecting biodiversity, then drew attention to the potential use of nature that could become infrastructure, which planners and policymakers then seized upon for research and development.⁷³ Drawing on studies of Kranji (a suburb in northwestern Singapore) and Pulau Tekong, planners have built a series of retaining walls on Pulau Ubin to shelter mangroves from strong waves and enable their propagation and regeneration.⁷⁴ Yet mangroves alone have no real prospect of mitigating sea level rise absent other interventions, owing to Singapore’s land scarcity and the relatively low levels of wave energy that mangroves can withstand. Some of the mangroves on Pulau Ubin were eroding until protective slopes were put in place which could accommodate both mangroves and protect them from the harsher currents of the Strait. Part of the reason why mangroves are apt to mitigate sea level rise through attenuating wave force, and thus erosion, aside from their intertidal capacity, is the fact that their root systems trap fine sediments and convert these into mud banks through sedimentation with accretion rates often exceeding rates of sea level rise.⁷⁵ Wayward coastal sediment is gathered into the mudbanks of the mangrove.

The transformation of mangroves into a resilience fetish becomes clearer when put in the context of Singapore’s coastal history, where the vast majority of its mangroves were destroyed in the course of hardening the coast, making it more vulnerable to sea level rise. Only now, when the artificial hardening of the coast has reached its apogee, does the value of mangroves become registered through the aperture of ecosystems services and blue carbon. The disposable, spatially intensive ecology that needed to be uprooted to make way for hard infrastructure must now be returned, as a choreographed and engineered landscape. This history becomes eerier when juxtaposed with the landscapes displaced by Singapore’s appetite for sand, as mangrove systems have been a significant source of sand exports. The mangrove forest of Koh Kong in Cambodia was one of the most intense sites of sand extraction for export to Singapore between 2008 and 2016, its sediment-rich river systems dredged with disastrous social and ecological effects.⁷⁶

Mangroves have become a resilience fetish through which the accumulation of sediment can be engineered as a landscape and socio-ecological amenity, a far cry from the black market excesses of the transnational sand market, with the upstream sources of sediment crucially precluded from the supposed benefits of resilience. In the past, coastal mangroves were uprooted to make way for new territory because they were not considered valuable; suddenly, under the threat of sea level rise, they have acquired particular utility as well as financial value (blue carbon), while those sources of sediment that comprise the surplus territory are similarly undervalued and excluded from calculations of resilience. The resilience fetish can be seen at work in the Singapore government’s repeated attempts to manipulate the mangrove biome to suit an eccentric range of aesthetic, infrastructural, and financial needs, completely divorced from the ecosystems that mangroves originally formed a part of. A repeated pattern of corruption, ecological degradation, and displacement associated with Singapore’s demand for sand points towards the fundamental necessity of extra-economic means to secure the low price and high volumes of sand the city-state requires.⁷⁷ The cultivation of new mangroves will ultimately naturalize these acts of granular arbitrage. Beyond the landscapes of resilience fetishism, granular arbitrage situates the wider movement of sediment within the logic of reclamation itself; what drives this geographic expansion is not simply some circumvention of spatial limits, but an intensification of economic activity and the enhancing of land values through reclaiming land. The devaluation of sediment is necessary at the granular frontier to secure sufficient volumes of the requisite grade of sand at one pole; and at the other pole, there is the careful calculation and calibration of land value which Singapore is renowned for, with the production of land parcels feeding cycles of development and redevelopment. What enables this formula to work are the mechanisms of valuation of land and devaluation of sand which granular arbitrage describes. It is not just that the Singapore government constructs valuable land with cheap sand, it is how they construct the value of land through this model of development, by creating flexibility and surpluses in their land system to create large speculative plans and make them concrete.

Granular arbitrage situates the wider structural features of sand markets, what asymmetries between buyers and sellers reveal about the fervent demand for sand, and the modes of urban speculation it underwrites.⁷⁸ Further exploration of the initial pricing of sand and its place in the budgets of these large-scale reclamation projects merits exploring in the context of the subsequent land values that become realized after the completion of the project, allowing a value-chain approach to be adopted for the sand trade and the true scale of granular arbitrage to be analysed on a project-by-project basis.

Granular arbitrage is necessary for the pursuit of new territory as a condition of Singapore’s urban and political-economic governance, which appears set to continue as long as the asymmetries of the sand trade persist and the extra-economic means of securing the supply of sand are obscured. Resilience, then, is not merely ideological camouflage for normalizing existing development tendencies and trajectories, but a method of demarcating the urban system that is to be preserved and displacing those ecological and geomorphological systems that are made chaotic by the extraction of sand.

Conclusion

What lies in the shadow of Singapore’s Long Island reclamation project are the sources of the 240 million tons of infill, including internally excavated soil as well as the precious tons of imported sand required to see the project through to completion (without even counting the hundreds of millions of tons required for the reclamation projects at Changi Bay, Pulau Tekong, and Tuas Megaport). The invocation of resilience as an ideal through which urban, financial, and ecological systems can be integrated through their uncertainties depends, fundamentally, on the system remaining closed to the externalities it churns up through the course of its operation. The resultant landscapes of resilience fetishism naturalize the unequal ecological exchanges which so often underly global city resilience strategies. The transformation of mangroves into a resilience fetish manipulated to act as a financial asset for carbon off-setting as well as a potential buffer against sea level rise⁷⁹ reveals the permutations of this form of resilience as the entrenchment of sedimentary systems not simply as extractive frontiers of urbanization but as sinks for coastal turbulence and uncertainty. Mangroves, which sequester carbon through the decomposition and compression of organic matter, are also canny accumulators of tidal sediment, revealing the granular preoccupation expressed through this resilience fetish. In this partitioned deployment of nature, the upstream sources of the territory these mangroves take root in are displaced through a systematic opacity, whereas the integration of urban, financial, and ecological systems in the city-state becomes more transparent to optimization.

This kind of granular arbitrage, in which the low price of sediment in one sand market is leveraged to export massive volumes elsewhere, often secured through covert political or other extra-economic means, is obvious in Singapore’s exceptional case, but is emblematic of a growing trend across the world, where reclamation and other kinds of territorial mitigations against sea level rise are being enacted and proposed, prompting the immense extraction of sand elsewhere. And it is this granular arbitrage that must be concealed for these enactments of resilience to be successful, with resilience fetishism being one method of concealment, evident through the rise of nature-based solutions which attempt to instrumentalize certain organisms or ecosystems as infrastructure to disguise the extractive basis of these interventions. The future mangroves that may be planted on Long Island are emblematic of this procedure, where a lively object will be abstracted from its ecosystem and transplanted to fulfil an instrumental role that, nonetheless, reconfigures it as an object that emblematizes resilience, thereby obscuring the wider geographical and historical relations underlying the fetishized landscape. In the less stark, but no less concerning, visions of urban resilience offered by the granular geographies of sea level rise, one can see the enactment of the resilience fetish in the displacement of granular arbitrage as a central mechanism through which “resilience” is leveraged for the expansion of territory and the intensification of urbanization.

Funding Statement

This article was written as part of a project that has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (Grant agreement No. 863944 THINK DEEP”)