Book Review Forum: Reimagining the More-Than-Human City: Stories from Singapore

Wang, Jamie, Reimagining the More-Than-Human City: Stories from Singapore, Urban and Industrial Environments Series. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2024; 268 pp.; ISBN: 9780262550932, £38.00/US $40.00 (pbk)

Introduction

Michele Acuto – University of Bristol, UK

Reimagining the More-Than-Human City brings environmental humanities in close dialogues with urban theory through a deconstruction of a variety of developmental sites in Singapore. It asks us to consider both deeply embedded human–nature encounters, as well as ephemeral entanglements, against the backdrop of high-tech futurism and persistent economic growth. It is a book that ‘hits home’ to many of us familiar with the Singaporean context but also provides a very accessible introduction to the Lion State’s political ecology to novices of this city or indeed Southeast Asia. Wang takes us through the politics, economics and tactics that are impacting the more-than-human urban underpinning the growingly tentacular global city. The book does so not just with matter-of-fact data and insights, but with a rich mix of narratives, stories and modes of deploying new urban imaginaries that make this far more than just a critique of the neoliberal urban imaginary of sustainability. The book is a gentle invitation to play with urban imaginations and futures, and to dialogue with nature in our urban theorising. It hits us right up front with the depth and potential involved in thinking urban theory through ecological entanglements, and does so in a context, like Singapore, that juxtaposes modern ideals of urban development with rhetoric and realities of a “garden city” renowned for its intertwining with nature. In this narrative Wang’s text is not just an infrastructural deconstruction, but also smoothly transitions into considerations of the aesthetics of the more-than-human city. The book is set around a variety of epistemological angles, but consistent throughout most of its chapters, summarised below in the three commentaries of this forum, is a play with the duality of visibility–invisibility and the political ecology of disappearance.

Reimagining the More-Than-Human City deals in a variety of infrastructural consequences of the urbanisation of Singapore, centred predominantly around major transport and water, as well as dwelling projects. The book is grounded, rich in account and recounting, but also provides some fitting interludes amidst chapters that are more future-oriented and seek to play effectively with the politics and possibilities of urban imagination that are available out there, and can cast a diverse form of encounters compared to the more technocratic and totalising, a view criticised by Wang across the volume. Fittingly, then, Wang’s description is not one for straight-cut blacks and whites: there is plenty of nuance to be found in the pages of the volume, with a subtle painting of diverse forms of environmentalisms and technocratic encounter with flora and fauna. With a sustained look ahead, Wang asks us to form our own opinions on the Singaporean stories we read, but with a grain of critical urbanist salt that needs to consider which futures are, as of the modes of ecomodernism embedded in place currently, ‘foreclosed’ and disappearing from view.

The book does not shy away from reaching out quite explicitly to professionals in landscape architecture and urban design and could teach real estate developers a thing or two too. In that the book is an invitation to engage and debate and, as Wang suggests from page one, better reimagine more-than-human encounters. In this forum we gather a variety of takes on Wang’s book, alongside an apt author summation of these commentaries, and hope to provide a good companion to such a rich read for anyone ready to dive, as we were, into Reimagining the More-Than-Human City.

Commentary I

Maxime Decaudin – National University of Singapore, Singapore

Reimagining the More-Than-Human City explores how sustainability is framed, planned, and implemented in Singapore. At the intersection of environmental humanities, political ecology, and urban studies, Jamie Wang offers a thorough and detailed critique of the Singapore development model, revealing its reliance on technocratic solutions, strategies of exclusion and erasure, and its aesthetic of control and efficiency.

Striving to export its development model to other nations, Singapore is frequently described as a global pioneer in green and sustainable urban solutions. To better analyse the kind of future Singapore imagines, the author mobilises the concept of eco-modernism, the belief that technological solutions and economic growth can address environmental crises without fundamentally restructuring society and capitalism. Singapore’s ecomodernist imaginary manifests through a series of projects and policies thoroughly documented by Wang’s extensive ethnographic fieldwork. In the first chapter, the increasingly frequent rebranding of the nation’s transformation from a ‘Garden City’ to a ‘City in a Garden’ or the promotion of spectacular displays of technological control over nature, such as in Gardens by the Bay, exemplifies the material and discursive production of what she calls ‘authoritarian nature’, in which a narrow definition of sustainability is imposed on the lives of humans and non-humans, in particular plants. The second chapter focuses on Singapore’s ceaseless land redevelopment, describing how former plantations have become housing estates, Kampongs have been replaced by new towns, and cemeteries are being cleared for transport infrastructure. Chapter 3 contrasts two major infrastructural projects: the Cross Island Line, the latest addition to the Mass Rapid Transit network, and the Eco-Link@BKE, an animal crossing bridge built over the Bukit Timah Expressway. Chapter 4 illustrates the city-state’s over-reliance on technological fixes by examining water desalination and recycling, in particular NEWater, through the lens of ‘cruel optimism’, a term that captures the paradoxical situation of the ecomodernist project seeking both a sustainable and an invulnerable future. Finally, Chapter 5 describes how technological innovations in urban farming fuel the nation’s dream for food security in a context of extreme land scarcity.

For every single one of these examples, Wang urges her readers to consider who benefits from these initiatives and asks what is lost in the process. As a landscape architecture educator in Singapore and an environmental historian, I find this approach methodologically productive. In a context where competition and innovation are praised over diversity and inclusion, it reminds me and my students to keep asking: Who are we not paying attention to? What are the blind spots that should at least be acknowledged and at best addressed?

Most chapters can therefore be understood as a variation on the theme of disappearance or continuous invisibilisation. For instance, Chapter 2, titled ‘The Invisible Times’, uses the concept of double erasure to capture how the continuous rewriting of Singapore’s landscapes not only removes the physical traces of the past but also erases the histories and collective memories associated with it. This is a concept that resonates with most scholarship on Singapore’s tangible and intangible heritage. This raises a difficult question for architects and designers: Can we design urban spaces that resist this cycle of disappearance? Is it possible to create buildings and landscapes that are historically embedded rather than endlessly replaceable? Although Jamie Wang does not engage in specific urban design discussions, she makes a compelling argument, in my opinion, towards adaptive reuse and open-ended strategies.

Another key concept developed by Wang to frame the hidden costs and casualties of this state-led march towards progress is found in Chapter 4. In her discussion of water management, Wang introduces the idea of decoupled water, where Singapore’s approach to water governance treats water as a technologically produced chemical compound rather than as an environmental resource with biological and ecological functions. Although Singapore is often celebrated for seeking self-sufficiency – recycling wastewater, desalinating seawater, and expanding its reservoirs – the author highlights how this approach reinforces rather than mitigates Singapore’s dependence on external water sources. By framing water as something to be engineered and optimised, the state maintains the appearance of independence while sidestepping more challenging issues of long-term resilience and geopolitical vulnerability. This is an argument that resonates with current debates on Singapore’s water-sensitive urban design initiatives, particularly the widely praised ABC Waters Programme. While projects like Bishan-Ang Mo Kio Park have transformed utilitarian drainage canals into more aesthetically appealing and ecologically integrated waterways, Wang raises a crucial question: Does this actually change the way Singapore consumes and cares for water, or does it simply aestheticise a better managed system, giving the impression of control and profusion?

Beyond critique, Wang advocates for a shift towards a more-than-human mode of inquiry, which, according to cultural geographer Sarah Whatmore, does not ‘presume that social-material change is an exclusively human achievement’ (Whatmore, 2006: 604). As such, Reimagining the More-Than-Human City helps us move beyond human-centred sustainable solutions typical of the ecomodernist agenda to reflect on the kind of relationships we, as urban dwellers, want to establish with non-humans around us. This is a shift in perspective that reveals the paradoxical nature of sustainability. In Chapter 3, the Cross Island Line threatens to fragment Singapore’s largest nature reserve in order to shorten the journey of millions of commuters by six minutes, saving fuel, cars on the road, and reducing emissions. On the other hand, the Eco-Link@BKE improves the animal connectivity between the Central Catchment Nature Reserve and the Bukit Timah Nature Reserve. While facilitating the movement of either humans or non-humans, both cases are portrayed by the state as sustainable, illustrating the ambivalence of an infrastructural approach to urban mobility.

Central to the more-than-human approach is the question of relationality and, by extension, that of ethical relations with non-humans. Chapter 5 introduces the concept of situated care, which emphasises place-based, relational engagements with nature rather than large-scale, top-down development models in the context of urban farming. Wang critiques a vision of industrialised agricultural production, which heavily relies on vertical farming, hydroponics and imported energy. Instead, she advocates for a relational approach to farming, one grounded in localism and care, small-scale, and community-driven agricultural practices. This notion aligns with Sara Jacobs’ concept of ‘landscapes of care’, which similarly critiques dominant, often extractive, landscape practices (Jacobs and Wiens, 2024). Both frameworks suggest that genuinely sustainable landscapes require long-term engagement, maintenance, and stewardship rather than productivity-driven one-time solutions.

For landscape architects and urban designers engaged in sustainability, I find this book to be both a challenge and an invitation. Wang compels us to ask: Are projects truly transformative, or do they simply reinforce existing paradigms? Are we designing for resilient and adaptive relationships with humans and non-humans, or are we merely reshaping the status quo that will always serve political and economic interests first? Embracing the political dimension of creativity, she invites her readers to ‘reimagine’ the future beyond the rhetorics of innovation and competition. Although the author does not expand on any practical implications for the professionals involved, the two inspirational interludes inserted between Chapters 1 and 2, and Chapters 4 and 5, illuminate new modes of futuring the more-than-human city in Singapore and beyond.

References

Jacobs S, Wiens T (2024) Landscapes of care: politics, practices, and possibilities. Landscape Research 49(3): 428–444. Crossref ; Web of Science ; Google Scholar

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Commentary II

Adam Searle – University of Nottingham, UK

Jamie Wang’s evocative monograph is an account of contrast and friction. It directs much-needed empirical and conceptual attention to the environmentalist tensions at the heart of urban governance in Singapore. Wang’s intervention eschews technological hubris and emphasises the uneven, lived realities of technological development for the multispecies city, by grappling with a range of practices which seek, in their own way, to cultivate counterhegemonic alternatives to the spectacle of ecomodernism. Although core to Wang’s argument is a more-than-human reading of ecological urbanism in a variety of contexts, this was not, in my reading, the monograph’s core provocation. Ecological entanglements were taken as the book’s starting point rather than conclusion, and the subsequent analysis does not fall into the trap of simply celebrating human/non-human collaborations in urban space but rather asks ‘who benefits?’ throughout (Giraud, 2019; Star, 1990). Reimagining the More-Than-Human City is therefore less a book focussed on questions of what the more-than-human city is, and more a book filled with provocations to explore practices of multispecies and muti-temporal imagining, of crafting response-able stories and inhabiting the contested histories and futures inaugurated by ongoing interventions of ecomodernity. The monograph does not simply monitor the ‘progress’ narrative underpinning the politics of green technofix urbanism; rather, Wang’s core question is: ‘Which future and past, and whose futures and pasts, have been foreclosed or disconnected?’ (Wang, 2024: 18). Justice – historical, future, human, non-human – is therefore always Wang’s object of inquiry as she navigates the politics, ecologies, and technologies shaping contemporary Singapore.

I first read this book while conducting fieldwork on ecomodernism in Singapore; I am incredibly grateful it was published at this personally serendipitous moment, for it provides a wealth of provocations for those researching aligned issues. It did what any good book should: it encouraged me see the world differently. Rather than chart the book’s structure or critique its theoretical merits, in this short review I want to take the liberty of dwelling on three core methodological reflections that my encounter with the text inspired, which have proven personally invaluable to think with, and learn from, in the months since my first encounter with Wang’s text as I seek to make sense of my own empirical material. These methodological reflections relate to, specifically: (1) technological ambivalence, (2) creative praxis, and (3) the ephemeral present.

In my own ethnographic engagements with urban agriculture systems in Singapore (covering both high-tech, ecomodernist controlled environments and community gardening movements, including permaculture), I have always been struck by a sense of pragmatism in the way futures (and, indeed, as Wang reminds us, histories) are articulated by participants. Even the staunchest defender of soil regeneration or urban agroecology can at least understand why vertical farms are touted as a technological solution to food security in an island city-state with no agrarian hinterland, where the limiting factor of most political decision-making is, more often than not, the scarcity of land. Wang’s (2024: 24) methodological approach is well suited to these historical, cultural, and ecological contexts. It resonates with this overarching sentiment I have experienced amongst participants, in that it is shaped by a technological ambivalence ‘firmly grounded in an ambivalent hope about technologically mediated paths’. Wang rejects prescriptive or normative solutionism of any form throughout the book, noting that ‘the practices and approaches in relation to some of the alternative nature-solutions that I explore are not total solutions to all the problems. Yet, these practices, coming with their own compromises, do enable different possibilities.’ Traversing empirical contexts of urban water provision and hydrological management, ‘garden city’ greening agendas and ecotourism, transport infrastructural development and animals’ mobilities or habitat connectivity, or the complex politics of changing foodscapes, Wang’s account identifies divergent environmentalisms ranging from ecocentric to technocentric. In reality, most instances in Wang’s ethnographic and archival reflections express a contested combination of seemingly contradictory ideologies and perspectives. Building on important contributions from feminist science and technology studies that illuminates the situatedness of knowledges (Haraway, 1988) and the ‘worldliness of technoscience’ (Haraway, 2004: 326), Wang’s approach is refreshing, negotiating antimonies and rejecting both dogmatic bourgeois technocentrism – symptomatic of ecomodernist desires to decouple ecology and economy – and radical ecocentricsm that suggests that a ‘pristine nature’ could be saved through rejecting technoscientific engagements with more-than-human worlds (see Castree, 2000). In sum, Wang encourages us to avoid preconceived (technophobic or technophilic) conclusions in empirical engagement with technonatures, taking the complexities of each case into consideration. This is a paramount research impetus for the ‘technonatural present’ of a mass-mediated age (Searle et al., 2024).

Wang showcases a range of speculative approaches which shape her own creative praxis of multispecies storytelling. Inspired by, and in conversation with, the work of feminist critical theorists, Wang explores prose, poetry and performative interventions in a reflexive and conceptually informed manner. As Wang (2024: 185) reflects in the book’s conclusion, ‘Cities are always already more-than-human. The more we seek to flesh out and foreground its multiplicity of actors and desires, the closer we would be to reimagining a more diverse and inclusive future’. These urban stories are found in a variety of manifestations throughout the book. To imagine forms of multispecies solidarity, for instance, Wang confronts the realities of habitat fragmentation from the perspective of a Sunda pangolin whose mobilities were affected by a highway which cuts across the Mandai jungle, literally attempting to move through the environment as these critically endangered mammals. These moments of hesitation inspire multispecies empathy for the ethnographer: ‘Without being shielded by the steel structure of a car, my body was intensely aware of how the whole environment trembled as it endured the velocity of nonstop traffic’ (Wang, 2024: 105). Elsewhere in the book, interwoven between analysis and qualitative materials, Wang provides stories and creative interventions in the form of poetry. These poetic interludes act as a counterpoint of affective intensity, shifting the reading rhythm and crafting opportunities to reimagine the city as a multispecies, indeterminate, and emergent ecology. My favourite poem in the book is called Who Holds My Name?, between a chapter on contested visions of the ‘Garden City’ narrative and the notion of ‘ecomodern amnesia’ ‘instigated and sustained by the intra-related erasures of the more-than-human environment and its entangled social, cultural, and ecological relations’ (Wang, 2024: 87). To quote a passage from one of Wang’s poems which exemplifies this transition: ‘Urban trees do not meet/other trees. They live/an instant life; they hold/no memory’ (Wang, 2024: 57–58).

Wang’s intervention comes at a critical juncture in the island city-state’s history, whereby governmental and economic initiatives are driving technoscientific development towards certain forms of ecomodernist futures, whilst, as Wang empirically charts throughout, foreclosing many alternatives for humans and non-humans alike. The ethnographic and qualitative empirical materials that shape the book’s analysis cover a period in the late 2010s, which raised an interesting methodological reflection commonly faced by researchers conducting observational social scientific work in Singapore, given its extraordinary rate of urban change: when do we historicise the ephemeral present? Many of the sites or organisations that appear throughout Wang’s 2024 book, writing in April 2025, already cease to exist: the NEWater Visitor Centre in Bedok closed its doors in July 2024; the Agri-Food and Veterinary Authority made way for the newly streamlined Singapore Food Agency in April 2019; Sky Greens, once the flagship hydroponic producers championed by the Singapore government for its innovative semi-automated ‘A-Gro’ towers which reduce reliance on LED lighting, was a vacant plot when I last cycled past in December 2024 (reflecting an increasingly common sight of abandoned vertical farms, as per Tan, 2024). This reflection holds significance for researchers examining the futuring practices of ecomodernist intervention; many of the cultural discourses, political dispositives, and technoscientific tools which surround and facilitate the effort to decouple ecology and economy are breathtakingly transient. Indeed, the venture capital-driven nature of vertical farming, for example, is itself built on high-risk and the ‘speculation on collapse’ (Guthman and Fairbairn, 2024). Bubbles burst, regimes change and public demands shift attention, discourse, and economies. All this unravels while climate catastrophe and ecological breakdown are making our world weirder by the day (Turnbull et al., 2022). The present is increasingly precarious, and it obliges us to craft meaningful stories, to make sense of contemporary ephemerality, for today, and for tomorrow. I am grateful to Jamie Wang for providing a rich assemblage of fabulative, critical, and imaginative apparatuses in her work which do just that.

Reimagining the More-Than-Human City is a timely contribution that will be enjoyed by academics and students thinking across multiple disciplines and working in various empirical contexts, not just urban scholars or those interested in Singapore. Wang’s wonderfully articulated contribution to the literature serves as a pertinent reminder that reimagining is itself a politically charged act, especially when approached in Wang’s fashion by accentuating questions of multispecies, multitemporal justice from the outset. Crucially, Reimagining the More-Than-Human City speaks for itself, and shows that our words have material-semiotic consequences for the more-than-human worlds we hope and collectively strive, in our modest ways, to build.

References

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Commentary III

Si Jie Ivin Yeo  – University of Oxford, UK

Amid the triple planetary crises of climate change, biodiversity loss and environmental pollution, Jamie Wang’s Reimagining the More-Than-Human City provides a timely and incisive intervention into urgent debates on urban sustainability and livability. The book invites us to rethink and reimagine how more ethical, inclusive and ecologically attuned urban futures might emerge through sustained engagement with more-than-human worlds. Thinking with the case of Singapore – one of the most urbanised and technologically advanced cities globally – Wang argues that the dominant imaginary of an urban ecofuture is mobilised and enacted through a specific conception of sustainability rooted in technoscientific rationality and capital-oriented development. Challenging this narrow framing, Wang interrogates Singapore’s sustainability efforts to reveal how they are in fact punctuated by more diverse and often paradoxical more-than-human encounters. The book not only critiques the prevailing human-centred, technocratic and capitalistic urban imaginary of sustainability and livability in Singapore but also contributes to broader ontological debates about the nature–culture divide, calling for a reimagining of urban spaces as relationally constituted by human and other-than-human inhabitation. In doing so, Wang offers a nuanced challenge to dominant paradigms of urban development and urges recognition of the multiplicity of urban natures in the Anthropocene.

Broadly situated within the field of environmental humanities, the book builds on a growing body of scholarship on urban imaginaries and extends ongoing debates about the social and political dimensions of urban sustainability. It engages critically with how cities might be differently imagined, narrated and governed, tracing what Wang describes as ‘the disavowal, separation, and yearnings that emerge in the multifaceted and contested narratives of urban development’ (p. 9). To advance this intervention, Wang introduces five conceptual tools –authoritarian nature, double erasure, multispecies movements, decoupled water, and situated care – that variously probe into how urban sustainability is envisioned and operationalised in Singapore. Authoritarian nature describes the exercise of state power over human and more-than-human life, enabling a technocratic ‘business-as-usual’ approach that masks and detracts from deeper ecological entanglements. Double erasure captures the simultaneous obliteration of the built and natural environment, along with their associated cultural memories and lifeways. The lens of multispecies movements draws attention to the selective (in)visibility and (im)mobility of various human and non-human actors within the urban landscape. Decoupled water critiques efforts to construct a narrative of ecological invulnerability and control through technological water that separates urban infrastructure from arguably unruly natural systems. Finally, situated care foregrounds the contingent and ambivalent practices of environmental maintenance and management that shape everyday urban life. Collectively, these concepts expose the internal contradictions of Singapore’s sustainability model and chart pathways beyond the impasse of velocity- and capital-driven urbanism, towards more plural, relational and ecologically grounded urban futures.

Alongside an introduction and epilogue, the book is structured into five chapters, each elaborating its central argument that prevailing human-centred, technocratic and capitalist framework for sustainable urban development in Singapore is untenable and potentially counterproductive, while advocating for engagement with more-than-human worlds to broaden the conceptual and practical scope of urban planning for sustainability. The first chapter delineates how national development, sustainability, technology and control converge and materialise through urban natures in Singapore. Through an analysis of various greening and de-greening initiatives, it reveals how the metaphor of the garden functions as a technology of control, disciplining and governing multispecies life to serve state objectives. The second chapter extends this narrative of control temporally, focussing on the demolition of Kampongs – traditional villages in Malay – as part of Singapore’s public housing and heritage programmes. It demonstrates how the selective preservation of an imagined past, combined with a repackaged eco-narrative that sustains the status quo and accelerates technological environmental fixes, contributes to a form of ecomodernist amnesia that silences and renders invisible cultural and ecological relations. The third chapter reflects on the complex entanglements of human and other-than-human mobility within the urban environment. Casting attention to a nature reserve in Singapore and its surrounding transportation plans, the analysis disrupts dominant velocity-driven and human-centred models of urban movement, revealing their reliance on reductionist and linear futures that ignore the ambivalence and complexity of multispecies movements. The fourth chapter turns to Singapore’s energy- and capital-intensive technological water production that aims to address both present and projected future water needs. The chapter reveals how technological water – both desalinated water and purified recycled water – is framed by the state as a geopolitical safeguard that detaches urban water infrastructure from meteorological and ecological contingencies, creating a narrative of ecological invulnerability and control. The final chapter investigates urban farming practices, such as rooftop gardens, community farms and organic agriculture, to explore localism and the diverse modes of care emerging within Singapore’s urban milieu. By advocating a form of relational and place-based environmental stewardship, the chapter argues for an alternative to capitalist imperatives and industrial farming rhythms that have wrought significant ecological and social losses.

One of the book’s most compelling insights is its careful and nuanced analysis of how imaginaries of ecomodernisation, futuring and more-than-human relations co-constitute Singapore’s sustainability efforts. Wang deftly traces the processes through which capitalist imperatives shape a specific model of urban development that prioritises growth and control while obscuring ecological limits and flattening the diversity of more-than-human entanglements. From the opening chapter, Wang demonstrates how state-sanctioned discourses of nature are strategically mobilised not only to govern non-human life but also to produce disciplined human subjects, sustaining a nature–culture binary and narrowing the scope of sustainability to a technocratic and capital-friendly vision. While Wang’s critique is persuasive, it raises questions about whether all forms of control, and by extension, planning, necessarily reinforce anthropocentric and technocratic urbanism. Could certain forms of urban intervention enable more-than-human flourishing as well? For instance, the clean-up and regulation of the Singapore River, though clearly part of a developmentalist agenda, have created conditions for unexpected interspecies encounters, such as with the otters and monitor lizards that now inhabit its system and banks. Might such instances suggest the potential for control and care to coexist in generative tension?

Another strength of Reimagining the More-Than-Human City, in my view, lies in its critical unpacking of the relationship between technonatures and urban imaginaries. Drawing on this conceptual frame, Wang convincingly demonstrates how narratives of the urban are shaped by reciprocal entanglements between technologies, environments and human–nature relations. Chapter four, for instance, offers an in-depth discussion of how water is framed as vital to the city-state’s survival and must therefore be rendered governable through technological interventions such as desalination and recycling. In my view, this analysis makes a valuable contribution to the growing literature on more-than-human urbanism by foregrounding how digital and infrastructural technologies mediate ecological relations and generate new configurations of multispecies knowing and experiencing. At the same time, given that Wang’s case study is Singapore, I found myself wishing the argument had engaged more directly with the Smart Nation initiative, the city-state’s most recent urban development blueprint. Since this initiative was launched in 2014 – contemporaneous with some of Wang’s examples – it would have been fruitful to examine if and how imaginaries of sustainability have been reshaped and rearticulated through the logics and practices of digitalisation. In particular, a closer look at how the Smart Nation initiative remobilises sustainability discourses might have further illuminated the co-constitution of (digital) technological governance, urban futures, and more-than-human lifeworlds.

In sum, the book makes a timely and significant contribution to the study of urban sustainability and livability. It is written with lyrical precision and evocative clarity, guiding readers through a rich and immersive journey across Singapore’s urban landscapes. Utilising an impressive array of sources – including interviews, participant observation, documentaries and poetry – Wang challenges dominant human-centred, high-tech, capitalist approaches to urban development and opens up possibilities for reimagining a more inclusive and diverse urban environment with a range of human and other-than-human entities and beings. Although focussing on Singapore, Reimagining the More-Than-Human City has wider theoretical and practical significance for global urban futures and is poised to become a foundational text in urban studies, especially for those engaging with environmental humanities, more-than-human urbanism and critical sustainability scholarship.

Author Response

Jamie Wang – The Education University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong

These dialogues with Reimagining the More-Than-Human City arrived while I was conducting fieldwork for a new project focusing on technological imaginaries of urban food production and exploring the concept of multispecies justice (Celermajer et al., 2021; Chao et al., 2022) in an urban context. How might we situate care in the complex technosphere in a climate-changing world? What might foregrounding more-than-human communities entail for urban designers? My interlocutors’ deeply thoughtful and generative responses feel like a gift that speaks to the book and my evolving thinking, and offers directions that urban environmental humanities may consider. Their constructive critiques, from various vantage points and specific areas of expertise, have allowed me to see the work and affect the book may do and perform, and pushed me to look further with a hopeful (albeit contingent) lens in this increasingly volatile time. For these and more, I am grateful.

Several threads have emerged from these commentaries, pointing to the aspects of temporality, heritage, technonatures and hope wrought with ‘continuous invisibilisation’ (Decaudin), injustice (Searle) and the notion of control (Yeo) in the context of contemporary socio-environmental issues in Singapore and beyond. As Adam Searle succinctly writes, ‘Justice – historical, future, human, non-human – is’ always Reimagining the More-Than-Human City’s ‘object of inquiry’. For environmental humanities, more-than-human scholarship and more, Susan Leigh Star’s (1990) ‘Cui bono?’ – Who benefits? – has been a key refrain. The book stems from my interest in the way in which injustice may morph – repackaged into narratives of ecomodernisation or disguised through a kind of policy rationality (Lea, 2020). More recently, the incorporation of natures as part of environmental solutions creates new modes of shadowed or ‘unacknowledged’ labour, for instance, through the concerted efforts of presenting other-than-human and some human labour as entirely ‘natural’ (Zhang, 2020) or apolitical. In these contexts, it is crucial to engage with a relational mode of thinking underpinned by an intersectional lens. Extending and channelling the conceptual discussion in the book to the realm of urban design and architecture, Maxime Dacaudin challenges us to ask: Are we designing for transformative relationships with humans and other-than-humans or ‘merely reshaping the status quo that will always serve political and economic interests first’?

In a related way, yet highlighting different temporal aspects, my interlocutors’ propositions of ‘cycle of disappearance’ (Decaudin) and ‘ephemeral present’ (Searle) – that reverberated in and beyond Reimagining the More-Than-Human City – underline that it is imperative and ethical work to be the witness of the unravelling past and present in the urban. Many technological futures are already undone before they are fully realised or have ever arrived, consumed by their own velocity or exasperation. Yet the imagining or ‘burst’ of promissory ecomodernist narratives (Searle; see Sexton et al., 2019) leaves material consequences. As we breathlessly chase a certain kind of future, is the pile of wreckage in the allegory of the angel of history the crumpled past left behind or the ‘looming catastrophe’ (Benjamin, 1968; Braun, 2015)? If some version of the present is ephemeral, I think all the more the question lies in what and how we may inherit responsibly. Responding to these points compels us to provide a thick account of situated more-than-human relations (including disconnections), make visible what has been erased to give rise to certain types of stories, and (re)imagine the futures that could have been (and can still be) forged. It is in this context that the apparatus of reimagining and restorying, with whom one imagines and stories, carries its political valence.

Si Jie Ivin Yeo’s invitation to think about whether all forms of control (and planning) reinforce anthropocentric urbanism is pertinent and important. In this time of ever-intensifying urbanisation and displacement of many beings, cities have in fact become spaces of refuge and sites of emergent ecologies (Kirksey, 2015). Here, control and the impossibility of total control shape multispecies and more-than-human relations profoundly (see Gandy, 2022; Stoetzer, 2022): some are convivial, others are merely tolerated, still many are curtailed or violent, but all are enmeshed in constant negotiation and encounters. Reimagining the More-Than-Human City attends to the consequences (intentionally or unwittingly) of various modes of control and care. Who is the object of control? Do they expand or diminish possibilities, for whom and at whose expense? These complexities are vital to hold onto, in particular when the policy and practices are not rooted in a situated way or the power of control is grossly asymmetrical. Here, a more-than-human lens that decentres human and urban exceptionalism is helpful in approaching and evaluating the planning narrative.

Much of the book, as Decaudin and Yeo point out, tracks and demonstrates how infrastructures and digital technologies mediate and reconfigure ‘multispecies knowing and experiencing’. I am haunted by particular kinds of infrastructures and the abundance and void they create that disrupt and disavow generational socio-ecological relations.

Adding to these dialogues, Yeo further suggests the opportunity to introduce more discussions on ‘how the Smart Nation initiative remobilises sustainability discourses’. Indeed, a series of conversations surrounding the concept of smart city took place at the beginning and well into the first half of this project. At the same time, the process of the research and my thinking have prioritised the encounters in the city-state, including the kind of “cruelly optimistic” (Berlant, 2011) technofuture such as the ever-flowing ‘decoupled water’. In a pervasive ‘technonatural present’ (Searle et al., 2024), Reimagining the More-Than-Human City, as Searle has highlighted, is neither technophobic nor technophilic but firmly rooted in ‘an ambivalent hope about technologically mediated path’ (Wang, 2024: 24; see Haraway, 2004: 326). Yeo’s (2023) own work, centring on Singapore’s ‘Smart Urban Living’ initiative, highlights ‘a deterministic and utopian framing of urban interventions’ as a broad concern of smart city initiatives around the world (p. 688). I am excited to think with these insights in my new projects on technological tracking, sensing and story-(un)making in the urban.

As we are writing these conversations, the construction of the Cross Island Line in Singapore has entered its second phase; so is the steady clearance of (secondary) forests to make way for various (eco)development projects in the city-state and elsewhere. Around the world, ecomodernist imaginings are taking new forms, from energy islands that promise green electricity as part of climate change adaptations (Wong, 2024) to other-than-humans positioned as ecosystem engineers (Lorimer, 2025). What kind of stories about the urban must we tell at the present time? How might we centre human and other-than-human communities through a more collaborative, sensitive, and place-centred approach? With these questions in mind, I thank all my interlocutors for their multifaceted conceptual and practical offerings across this review forum that have opened new modes of engaging with the urban, in all its spatial, temporal, material and more-than-human dimensions.

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