ABSTRACT
Since the 1980s, Singapore’s policy-makers and politicians have argued that further expansion of the Singapore economy required spaces and labour beyond the 680-square-kilometre territorial limits of the city-state. Ambitious land reclamation schemes had their physical limits in terms of their capacity to provide new commercial and residential spaces. Intensive redevelopment and state-finessed (and frequently state-financed) gentrification strategies in locales where ‘heritage’ could be profitably mobilized also ran up against the sheer density of population (over 5,000 people per square kilometre) and urbanization. With an accumulation and development strategy founded on exports, transhipment and a reputation as
a relatively secure and efficient regional base for services, banking and brokering, Singapore had long needed to import cheap contract labour from elsewhere in Asia (especially from Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, the Philippines, Sri Lanka and Thailand), source skilled workers globally and consume vast quantities of resources and provisions (from foodstuffs, to sand for the construction industry, to drinking water) from elsewhere in Southeast Asia and as far away as Europe and New Zealand. Singapore has hence been particularly active in pursuit of multilateral and bilateral ‘free trade’ agreements. Since the 1980s, however, a more formal arrangement with Singapore’s immediate neighbours has also been sought. The Singapore government fostered deeper economic cooperation with these regional neighbours, most famously in the form of a so-called Growth Triangle (formalized in a tripartite treaty signed in 1989), centred on the city-state, but incorporating proximate areas of Malaysia and Indonesia (see Figure 22.1). In addition to the expectations of resort development and tourists traversing the Growth Triangle’s peripheries, corporate and official narratives about the putative complementarities of this triangular arrangement proliferated (see Bunnell et al. 2006; Phelps 2004a; Sparke et al. 2004). These argued that the other sides of the triangle would benefit from inflows of investment and expertise; while the city-state itself would benefit from the availability of relatively cheap land and labour in the Malaysian state of Johor and, more markedly, on the Riau islands (chief among them Batam and Bintan) of Indonesia. In more critical terms, the profound and often contradictory social, environmental and economic consequences of opening vast tracts of land in the island of Batam to Singaporean and other foreign investment have been traced elsewhere (for example Grundy-Warr et al. 1999; Lindquist 2009; Mack 2004; Phelps 2004b).
