Reimagining the More-Than-Human City

“By examining the various human and non-human agents that have co-shaped Singapore’s urban development, Wang breaks new ground and opens up space for imagining more socio-ecologically diverse and inclusive urban futures.”
—Creighton Paul Connolly, Assistant Professor, Department of Urban Planning and Design, University of Hong Kong

“In this rich and insightful study Jamie Wang uses Singapore as a laboratory to extend our understanding of the more-than-human city. Wang shows that Singapore’s drive to be a global exemplar for ‘green urbanism’ is rooted in an authoritarian discourse of ecological, social, and spatial control.”
—Matthew Gandy, Professor of Geography, University of Cambridge; author of Natura Urbana

“Jamie Wang offers us a powerful way of counter-imagining the modern city in the Anthropocene: this is a book of hope and creativity, as well as critical insight.”
—Emily Potter, Professor in Literary Studies and Associate Head of School (Research) for the School of Communication and Creative Arts, Deakin University

“Reimagining the More-Than-Human City is a vital intervention that speaks not only to scholars of cities and environmental humanities but also to a broader readership grappling with the contradictions of green modernity. Through a careful mix of analysis, critique, and poetic interlude, Wang offers a vital model for thinking the city anew: not as a machine for offshoring sustainability but as a terrain of contested multispecies futures.”
—H-Environment

“Its title is particularly apt, as the book not only reimagines futures beyond state-aligned visions but also traverses complex time-space relations. Moreover, its emphasis on the more-than-human—incorporating nonhuman actors such as animals, ancestors, technology, soil and water—reinforces its argument that the city is constituted by more-than-human agencies.”
—Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography

“Utilising an impressive array of sources–including interviews, participant observation, documentaries and poetry–Wang challenges dominant human-centred, high-tech, capitalist approaches to urban development and opens up possibilities for reimagining a more inclusive and diverse urban environment with a range of human and other-than-human entities and beings. Although focussing on Singapore, Reimagining the More-Than-Human City has wider theoretical and practical significance for global urban futures and is poised to become a foundational text in urban studies, especially for those engaging with environmental humanities, more-than-human urbanism and critical sustainability scholarship.”
—Urban Studies

“Wang’s study provides important lessons about the deficiencies of human-centred, capitalist, and technocratic forms of sustainable development. She argues that the championing of technoscientific innovation and economic growth serves to obliterate the social and cultural aspects of everyday life while alienating humans from their non-human surroundings…

….Her insights go beyond Singapore to include all cities that are striving to align economic growth with ecological protection. Green and prosperous cities will not be achieved through the development and implementation of technology-led capitalist growth but instead require deliberate and sustained efforts to integrate humans and non-humans in the messy multiplicity of everyday life.”
— LSE Review of Books

Jamie Wang is an urban environmental humanities researcher, 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.

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