Four Dimensional Segregation: How the Global City Keeps Migrants out of Sight and out of Mind

• In Event: 40252 - Mechanisms of Segregation

Abstract

How does a city literally and figuratively ‘invisibilize’ specific populations from mainstream public life? This paper examines the maintenance of migrant worker invisibility in Singapore and other cosmopolitan global cities, particularly state-led practices of social exclusion and spatial regulation. Drawing on 18+ months of ethnographic research on temporary migrant workers, I show how citizenship status has become a significant marker of social relations in the Singaporean city-state. Ever-evolving technologies—the reified national border, digital record-keeping, national ID cards, biometric scanners, omnipresent CCTV cameras, and other innovations—have enabled new faultlines of social categorization, translating citizenship status into tiers of inclusion and exclusion, and then into salient markers in the everyday life of the city.
I explain how four dimensions of urban segregation operate in fast-rising global hubs. 1) Beginning with the standard two-dimensional geographic view, I introduce the three types of migrant worker housing—the enclave, embedded, and externalized—and explain how each is adapted to segregation in the urban environment. 2) I consider emerging dynamics of three-dimensional vertical exclusion in the urban form. 3) I conclude by introducing an oft-overlooked fourth dimension: temporal segregation. Whereas classical urban theory has treated the city as a two-dimensional plane, and whereas a new generation of scholars has begun to analyze cities as three-dimensional spaces (i.e., where different social classes can be physically stratified by verticality), I show how urban spaces are also segregated by time.
My underlying implication, throughout, is that strategies of urban governance in Singapore provide ‘ethical distance’—camouflaging the very humanity of temporary migrant workers. Workers may be literally hidden or socially ‘hidden in plain sight,’ but without opportunities to embed themselves in the everyday life, relations, and social institutions of the city, they will remain disposable instruments of labor rather than individual personalities in the urban social fabric.

Author

• Kurt Kuehne, New York University Abu Dhabi