FARMING THE GARDEN CITY: A SITUATED URBAN POLITICAL ECOLOGY OF SINGAPORE’S URBAN AGRICULTURE SECTOR

Abstract

In recent years, several commercial urban farms have established in Singapore, to much public attention. This trend is paradoxical given the state’s economic and spatial marginalisation of agriculture from the 1960s. In response, this thesis seeks to understand tsuch developments through an empirical examination of the motivations and processes behind commercial urban farming. It thus uses methods such as semi-structured interviews with farm managers/owners, farm and field site visits, along with discourse analysis to understand the phenomenon of commercial urban agriculture. Underlying the research is a situated urban political ecology that frames urban farms of forms of nature that are co-produced in a political process characterised by the entrepreneurial developmental (city-)state. The research findings have empirical contributions in providing a study of commercial, as opposed to non-profit, urban agriculture, as well as a thus-far rare perspective of urban agriculture from a developmental state.