Human Geography Commons^™

Spiritual Gentrification Amid The Rise Of Platform Urbanism: "Wanghong Temples" And Emerging Buddhist Cultural Economies In Tianzhu Road, Hangzhou, China, Han Zhang, Junxi Qian, Lily Kong

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

This study scrutinizes how the Tianzhu Road in the Lingyin Community - a peri-urban area in Hangzhou ringed by a cluster of temples that constitutes a distinct spiritual enclave - has been reworked through a two-phase gentrification process driven by the spiritual aesthetics and platform logics. Drawing on a two-month ethnography and media content analysis, this study conceptualizes spiritual gentrification as a spiritual aesthetics and culture-oriented recalibration of urban space in which spiritual elements operate as symbolic capital, attracting culturally motivated entrepreneurs and aligning the spiritual atmosphere with slow-life values as an alternative to urban modernity. In particular, platform urbanism …

Beyond Resilience: The Case For Regenerative, Restorative Cities, Lily Kong

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

In a commentary, SMU President Professor Lily Kong mentioned that at the City Dialogues event, co-convened by SMU and Urban Innovation Vienna, participants agreed that cities must equip their residents to withstand shocks and thrive in an evolving urban environment. Prof Kong said resilient cities anticipate, adapt and respond effectively to disruptions, which involves attention not only to physical infrastructure, but also to social cohesion and institutional foresight. She said that embedding sustainability into urban design is fundamental to ensuring cities flourish in a world of climate uncertainty and resource constraints. She added that the value of urban resilience lies …

Asia’S Future Will Be Won By Soft Power, Not Force, Lily Kong

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Lily Kong argues that while force remains essential to deter aggression and manage worst-case scenarios, military strength may prevent defeat, but it rarely produces legitimacy. When hard power dominates the strategic imagination, volatility rises and markets suffer. Soft power – the ability to influence countries through persuasion, attraction and legitimacy – has become a strategic asset, she writes. It shapes expectations, lowers baseline tensions, and creates off-ramps in moments of crisis, often determining whether tensions escalate, how long crises last, and how much economic damage they inflict. Prof Kong believes that in a nuclear-armed, economically interdependent Asia, the real test …

Can Singapore Be A City That Bounces Back And Gives Back?, Lily Kong

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

In a commentary, SMU President Professor Lily Kong called for a widened definition of sustainability in city-making. She proposed that cities must be resilient, regenerative and restorative (3Rs) — able to withstand shocks, replenish ecosystems, and restore human well-being. Prof Kong cited Singapore’s Draft Master Plan 2025 as an illustration of balancing technical innovation with inclusive engagement, stressing that trust is the “invisible infrastructure” of resilience. She also emphasised the role of universities as conveners of dialogue and innovation, spotlighting SMU’s co-convening of the City Dialogues in Vienna and its hosting of the Lee Kuan Yew Global Business Plan Competition, …

3r-Stadte Furs Leben Gestalten [Designing 3r Cities For Life], Lily Kong

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

What does it mean for a city to be resilient in today’s world? In July this year, over 100 city leaders, scholars, and industry partners gathered at City Dialogues in Vienna, co-convened by Singapore Management University and Urban Innovation Vienna, to reflect on the critical question of urban resilience. Held alongside the Mayors Forum of the World Cities Summit 2025, the dialogue provided a timely opportunity to share how cities can navigate complexity—not only in response to disruption, but also in pursuit of sustainable and inclusive futures. Inspired by SMU City Dialogues, I explore here how cities can bounce back, …

Singapore At 60: Home Truly Is An Idea That Never Stands Still, Lily Kong

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

There are many new stories to embrace but also quiet distances between us that we must bridge.

In a National Day op-ed published in The Straits Times, SMU President Professor Lily Kong reflects on what ‘home’ means as Singapore marks its 60th year of independence — and how that meaning continues to evolve across generations. Prompted by a walk through a familiar playground now transformed, Prof Kong considers how Singapore’s changing physical and social landscape mirrors shifts in national identity. While progress and policy evolution signal a society in transition, she also notes the emergence of quieter divides – between …

A Rose Or A Unicorn? Asean’S Mission Under The Spotlight, Lily Kong

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

In a commentary, SMU President Professor Lily Kong explores the question posed by political scientist Donald Emmerson in 1995 - is Southeast Asia more like a vibrant rose or an elusive unicorn? Against the backdrop of the 44th ASEAN Summit, with the theme "Connectivity and Resilience", Prof Kong highlights ASEAN's efforts in fostering regional connectivity and resilience through economic growth, cultural exchanges, and digital advancements. Despite substantial economic integration and digital connectivity, she points out that ASEAN faces challenges in creating a cohesive regional identity. The piece argues for deeper cultural engagement and a focus on shared values to build …

Is This Home Truly? Reflections On Singapore As It Turns 59, Lily Kong

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

In a commentary, SMU President Professor Lily Kong shared her reflections on Singapore as it turns 59. She discussed Singapore's nation-building process and offered her views on how the country can strengthen its social compact to make Singapore a home for Singaporeans.

Humanities And Social Sciences: Everything, Everywhere, All At Once, Lily Kong

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

In a commentary, SMU President Professor Lily Kong discussed the importance of the social sciences and humanities, and explained how they significantly impact our daily routines and life choices. She emphasised the need for scholars of social sciences and humanities to expand channels of communication and engagement with diverse audiences. They should share insights and findings, collaborate across disciplines and sectors, and harness the synergies and complementarities of different perspectives and approaches. Prof Kong opined that for Singapore, the disciplines constitute a collective strategic asset that will enable the country to move forward into a more equitable, sustainable, and compassionate …

Exploring The Dynamics Of Cross-Boundary Interactions In Qinglinkou, China: The Perspective Of Networks Of Second-Home Owners, Meiling Wu, Mengqiu Cao, Jiuxia Sun

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Cross-boundary interactions between second-home owners and local are complex over time–networks form and evolve within second-home owners and between owners and locals, each with its deliberately selective inclusion and exclusion. However, little attention has been paid to this phenomenon in the literature. This study, based on social network analysis alongside qualitative interviews, explores the dynamics of interactions between second-home owners and locals by analysing the networks formed by second-home owners in Qinglinkou, China. The ways in which second-home owners maintain and strengthen pre-existing networks with other owners and forge new links with locals, shape the cross-boundary interactions between the two …

Singapore's Hawker Culture At A Crossroads, Lily Kong

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

In a commentary, SMU President and Lee Kong Chian Chair Professor of Social Sciences Lily Kong discussed how Singapore’s hawker culture – which has been a key part of life in Singapore – has developed over the years. She also noted the anxieties over the long-term sustainability of hawker culture, but cited the 2021 National Environment Agency Hawker Perception Survey which offered cause for optimism as the overall experiences of and attitudes towards hawker centres were positive. Prof Kong noted the efforts made in encouraging young Singaporeans to enter the hawker trade and ensure recipes were inherited, but concluded only …

The Political Ecology Of Death: Chinese Religion And The Affective Tensions Of Secularised Burial Rituals In Singapore, Quan Gao, Orlando Woods, Lily Kong

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

This paper explores the political ecology of death and the affective tensions of secularised burial rituals in Singapore. Although scholars have recently acknowledged the roles of biopower and affect in shaping environmental politics, religion and death as socio-affective forces have not been substantively engaged with by political ecologists. We argue that death is inherently both a spiritual and ecological phenomenon, as it exposes not only the spiritual geographies that structure how people see the natural world, but also the affective tensions and struggles over what counts as a “proper” form of burial in relation to religion and nature. First, we …

Infrastructure's (Supra)Sacralizing Effects: Contesting Littoral Spaces Of Fishing, Faith, And Futurity Along Sri Lanka's Western Coastline, Orlando Woods

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

This paper explores the ways in which infrastructural development can cause the sacred to become a source of political legitimacy, and sacred authority to become a politically charged construct. For resource-dependent communities, the ecological damage caused by infrastructural development can cause ostensibly profane issues to be imbued with sacred meaning and value. With sacralization comes the expectation that figures of sacred authority will campaign for justice on behalf of the communities that they represent. However, when the authority evoked comes from outside the boundaries of institutionalized religion, processes of suprasacralization come into play. By exploring infrastructure’s (supra)sacralizing effects, I demonstrate …

A Journey Of A Thousand Miles Begins With A Single Step: Towards A Confucian Geopolitics, Lily Kong

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

This commentary welcomes the opportunity of a dialogue on the development of a Confucian geopolitics that offers an alternative to the prevailing dominant geopolitical theories. Three areas are discussed to further development of such an alternative. The first is the challenges (and not only the opportunities) of recovering Confucian values to inform foreign policy and international relations. The second is the appropriation of Confucian philosophy to legitimize state action, and how this is actually playing out in present-day China. The third is the slippage between narrative and practice – that is, how a narrative of Confucian geopolitics is translated in …

What And Whose Confucianism? Sinophone Communities And Dialogical Geopolitics, Quan Gao, Justin K. H. Tse, Orlando Woods

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

This commentary responds to An et al.’s (2020) article, ‘Towards a Confucian geopolitics’ by re-examining ‘the political’ of Confucianism and its contribution to fostering a cosmopolitan form of Confucian geopolitics. By taking note of the differences within and between Sinophone communities, we discuss the variegated forms of Confucianism, and their various geopolitical implications. In doing so, we call for re-theorising Confucian geopolitics as dialogical geopolitics that challenges the cultural and ideological basis of statist and Sino-centric geopolitics.

The Territoriality Of Teams: Assembling Power Through The Playing Of Pokémon Go, Orlando Woods

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

This paper explores how the playing of Pokémon Go can cause power to be assembled, and team-based expressions of territoriality to manifest. By playing the game, players become embedded within digital assemblages of power, which they reproduce through their interactions with other players, game features, and public spaces. When digital assets—such as gyms—are indexed to public spaces, players work together in teams to compete for digital ownership, and control, of these assets. In turn, this leads to the forging of a team-based sense of territoriality that is pervasive, and maximized by consolidating the power of the assemblage. Qualitative data are …

Geographies Of Creativity: Inherited Concepts, Revised Vistas, Anjeline De Dios, Lily Kong

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Given growing criticism in recent years against what might variously be referred to as the ideology of creativity, the hegemony of creativity, and enforced creativity, it might seem unwise to produce a book, let alone a handbook, about creativity. As far as conceptual fads go, the creative turn has itself taken such a diverse trajectory of ‘turns’, oftentimes in divergent ways that do not interact, that the term may justly be discredited in some quarters. Nevertheless, strategies and policies anchored on the notion of creativity remain enthusiastically adopted and adapted in many policy circles, perhaps particularly in the Asia-Pacific region, …

“Daughter” As A Positionality And The Gendered Politics Of Taking Parents Into The Field, Menusha De Silva, Kanchan Gandhi

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Research on gendered politics of the field has delved into the practices of accompaniment and its implications on research and knowledge production, particularly through the case of researchers’ children and partners. In comparison, the tendency to seek assistance from parents is neglected within the scholarship. Drawing on the PhD fieldwork experiences of two researchers in their “native” country, specifically a Sri Lankan researcher conducting fieldwork in Sri Lanka and a North Indian scholar researching in South India, the paper reveals parents’ contribution to the research process, in terms of enhancing researcher credibility, facilitating contact‐making and access, and providing emotional and …

Dialogue With Religious Life In Asia, Lily Kong, Junxi Qian

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Over the past decade or so, debates on the advent of a postsecular present have moved center-stage in social and cultural theory. These exchanges have made commendable achievements in analyzing the increasing relevance of religion to public politics and policies. Theorization of the postsecular makes for a hefty intellectual agenda, and a comprehensive review of this agenda is clearly beyond the scope of a single contribution, addressed, more appropriately, in a collective way by this Handbook. Nevertheless, we would like to contribute a few ideas to help delineate the broader permutations of the postsecular turn in social sciences, which serve …

No-Place, New Places: Death And Its Rituals In Urban Asia, Lily Kong

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

In many Asian cities, particularly those that confront increasing land scarcity, the conversion from burial to cremation has been encouraged by state agencies in the last several decades. From Hong Kong to Seoul to Singapore, planning agencies have sought to reduce the use of space for the dead, in order to release land for the use of the living. More secular guiding principles regarding efficient land use in these cities had originally come up against the symbolic values invested in burial spaces, resulting in conflicts between different value systems. In more recent years, however, the shift to cremation and columbaria …

Review: Humanist Geography: An Individual's Search For Meaning By Yi‐Fu Tuan, Justin K. H. Tse

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Yi‐Fu Tuan's latest book is a defence of individualism aimed at a wide lay readership, “a book on education that could benefit children everywhere” (p. ix). It is also a fascinating illustration of the relevance of geographies of religion to ongoing interests in humanistic geography. Indeed, one of Tuan's central arguments is that “religious thinking both undergoes and completes humanist thinking” and is therefore not “a relic that humanism has to outgrow,” for that would be a “regrettable” narrowing of the “scope of inquiry” in humanistic geography that “offends the spirit of humanism” (p. 5). It is this latter interest …

Review: The Color Of Success: Asian Americans And The Origins Of The Model Minority Myth By Ellen Wu, Justin Kh Tse

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Weaving rich institutional histories of groups that have purported to speak for all Asian Americans, like the Japanese American Citizens League and the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association, Ellen Wu’s The Color of Success meticulously describes how their claims to represent their ethnic communities were vigorously contested by Japanese and Chinese Americans themselves from the 1930s to the 1960s. Wu sets these representational challenges against the larger backdrop of the rise of an American liberal political framework and its assimilationist agenda for racial minorities in the United States in the 1930s, which was produced by the geopolitical challenges of totalitarian fascism …

Introduction: Religion And Place: Landscape, Politics, And Piety, Elizabeth Olson, Peter Hopkins, Lily Kong

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

In 2010, a 14-year-old boy was brutally murdered in a suburb outside of Rio de Janeiro when a group of skinheads observed him at a party and suspected that he might be gay (McLoughlin 2011). This scale of horrific homophobia is not uncommon in Brazil, where rates of violence against gays, lesbians, and transgendered people are reported to be amongst the highest in the world. A study conducted with the support of Grupo Gay da Bahia offers the conservative estimate of 260 gays killed in the country in 2010, indicating that rates doubled in only 5 years. The statistic sits …

Balancing Spirituality And Secularism, Globalism And Nationalism: The Geographies Of Identity, Integration And Citizenship In Schools, Lily Kong

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Geographies of education have drawn more research attention in the last decade. The varied motivations for geographical attention to education have led to divergent approaches. First, a macro, political economy or "outward looking" approach has examined educational provision and what it tells us about wider social, economic and political processes. Second, a micro, social-cultural or "inward looking" approach has emphasised social difference within school spaces, and the links between home and educational spaces. This latter approach has also acknowledged the importance of the voices of children and young people in understanding educational experiences. In this paper, l take stock of …

Homo Religiosus? Religion And Immigrant Subjectivities, David Ley, Justin Kh Tse

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Once ignored in national and international public policy, religion has made a comeback as policymakers have noticed the significance of the resurgence of religion, especially due to migration flows. While laudatory of these developments, this chapter specifies the need for a theological reading of the migrant religious practitioner as homo religiosus. First, we describe the social geographies of immigrant religion in an international context, drawing attention to the vibrancy of religious devotion, especially Christianity from the global south, among migrant groups. Second, we re-conceptualise religious belief through the theoretical work of John Milbank and Charles Taylor as they recuperate a …

The Geographies Of Religious Conversion, Orlando Woods

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

The paper reviews the corpus of research that attempts to explain the process of religious conversion, and explores the ways in which geographers can add new perspectives to the discourse. It argues that religious conversion is a phenomenon that goes beyond the reorientation of individual belief, and is instead a process of change that involves the (re)definition of self and other. Five conceptual frames are proposed - (1) conversion of space; (2) spaces of conversion; (3) spaces of negotiation; (4) the (im)mobile convert; and (5) the (dis)embodied convert - which are used to help define the geographies of religious conversion.

Singapore’S Chinatown: Nation Building And Heritage Tourism In A Multiracial City, Brenda S. A. Yeoh, Lily Kong

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

This paper focuses on the pivotal role played by the state in refashioning the Chinatown landscape as part of both nation-building and heritage tourism projects, and the ensuing cultural politics. After a brief history of the creation of Singapore’s Chinatown, the paper discusses, first, Chinatown’s place in Singapore’s post-independence nation-building project and, second, the reconfiguration of the Chinatown landscape as a tourism asset. The final section reflects on the changing politics of place as Chinatown gains legitimacy in state discourses on heritage, tourism and multiculturalism, as well as in the popular imagination as an ethnic precinct par excellence.

From Precarious Labor To Precarious Economy? Planning For Precarity In Singapore's Creative Economy, Lily Kong

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

The important place of the oftentimes "hidden" independent worker, or freelancer, has been acknowledged in developed countries where the creative economy has grown. These creative workers do not belong to the traditional employment set-up organized around firms. Instead, they move from portfolio to portfolio, assignment to assignment, interspersing corporation-based jobs with periods of self employment. Their work offers freedom, independence and creative space, but has also been characterized as precarious, because the securities of old working patterns no longer hold. While governments in many countries and cities have become attracted to the potential of the creative economy, those that have …

Global Shifts, Theoretical Shifts: Changing Geographies Of Religion, Lily Kong

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

The paper evaluates the burst in geographical research on religion in the last decade. It examines: (1) the relative emphases and silences in analyses of different sites of religious practice, sensuous geographies, population constituents, religions, geographies and scales of analyses; (2) the rise in the discourse of postsecularization; and (3) four contemporary global shifts (growing urbanization and social inequality, deteriorating environments, ageing populations, and increasing human mobilities), the ways in which religion shapes human response to them, and the implications for new research agendas. © 2010 The Author(s).

Introduction: Culture, Economy, Policy: Trends And Developments, Lily Kong

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

The important nexus between culture and economy is by no means a recent development nor a novel inclusion on the social science agenda. As Harvey pointed out in his foreword to Zukin's (1988)Loft Living, the artist, as one `representative' of the cultural class, has always shared a position in the market system, whether as artisans or as “cultural producers working to the command of hegemonic class interest”. In the last two to three decades, in the US and more lately, in western Europe, cultural activities have become increasingly significant in the economic regeneration strategies in many cities. Geographers, however, have …