By Jamie Wang. MIT Press, 2024.

This book is an exploration of the multifaceted urban environmental issues in Singapore through a more-than-human lens, calling for new ways to think of and story cities. As climate change accelerates and urbanization intensifies, our need for more sustainable and livable cities has never been more urgent. Yet, the imaginary of a flourishing urban ecofuture is often driven by a specific version of sustainability that is tied to both high-tech futurism and persistent economic growth. What kinds of sustainable futures are we calling forth, and at what and whose expense? In Reimagining the More-Than-Human City, Wang attempts to answer these questions by critically examining the sociocultural, political, ethical, and affective facets of human-environment dynamics in the urban nexus. Widely considered a model for the future of urbanism and an emblematic global city, Singapore is a fascinating site to explore how modernist sustainable urbanism is imagined and put into practice. Drawing on field research, this book explores distinct and intrarelated urban imaginaries situated in various sites. This book also attends to more contingent yet hopeful alternatives that aim to reconfigure current urban approaches. In the face of growing enthusiasm for building high-tech, sustainable, and “natural” cities, the book ultimately argues that urban imaginings must create space for a more relational understanding of urban environments and diverse futures.

Jamie Wang is an urban environmental humanities scholar, writer, and poet. She is Research Assistant Professor at the Education University of Hong Kong. Jamie is also an editor of the journal Feminist Review.