Cityscapes & Infrastructures

Often, Asian cityscapes and infrastructures that find their way into visual expressions such as film or game scapes, feature recognisable eye-catching architectural icons, sprawling skyscrapers or nature, if not neon lights, shady-looking Chinatowns, dilapidated buildings, streets or infrastructures. On another level, many Southeast Asian cities are sites of ongoing imaginations of modernity and (economic) progress, attested by seemingly never-ending construction projects—the next shopping mall or residential complex; a new piece of reclaimed land, dam, airport, freeport or storage facilities; multi-state or multi-countries high speed rail trains, new roads and expressways, or increasing the speed of telecommunications, finance and information flows etc. Such infrastructures are often depicted as visible and massive-scale projects and structures that enable the life of a city, in terms of flows of people, goods, information, money and services. 

One such project would be the transnational Belt Road Initiative (BRI) which started in 2013. Part of addressing an ‘infrastructure gap’ in Southeast Asia, this initiative spanning countries across South Asia and Africa, sees China investing in infrastructural construction and network projects, such as the building of high-speed railways, highways, power grids, deep-water ports and logistical hubs in Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines and Vietnam. 

Another feat of infrastructural logistics would be Indonesia’s project of relocating its overcrowded and sinking capital city of Jakarta on the island of Java, to a constructed-from-scratch city called Nusantara, on Borneo island. With an astronomical cost of 466 trillion rupiahs (35 billion US dollars) and a projected completion time in 2045, this new capital city (or ‘new Indonesia’, as termed by the previous president, Jokowi) would boast of being a smart, high-tech, green forest-city, with the hope of attracting digital nomads and cryptocurrency wealth. This project, while in its infancy stage, already faces financial woes, such as the lack of, and withdrawal of funding support and major cost overruns, potentially adding to Indonesia’s already increasing national public debt.

In the midst of optimism in progress promised by sprawling scales of infrastructural projects and ambitions, one cannot help but also think of another ‘failed’ forest-city, namely Malaysia’s (in)famous Forest City. Launched in 2014 and also under the BRI project, this ambitious and behemoth private, gated residential project was to be located across four new artificial islands, and home to hundreds of thousands of residents, including those from the Middle East, Indonesia, Thailand and China. However, with a change in government and corruption scandals in Malaysia, coupled with financial woes of China real-estate companies, the project languished and now stands in the shadows as a ghost-city. There has however, been renewed plans to attempt injecting life once again into this project, albeit in its early days. Mosser and Avni have nevertheless described various issues stemming from this project, such as the overreliance on migrant construction workers who face precarious living and working conditions. Another includes its environmentally destructive impact, as the project sits atop Malaysia’s largest seagrass field, which provides habitat for endangered animals, as well as land reclamation which threatens the coastal livelihoods of  nearby indigenous and local Malay communities. 

On a tangential but related note, in terms of visual culture, one thinks of the Thai horror film, The Promise (2017), featuring the prominent unfinished construction site of the Sathorn Unique Tower skyscraper. Initially planned as a luxury high-rise condominum, the project was halted during the Asian financial crisis in 1997 with the collapse of Thailand’s real estate market and numerous finance companies, and now stands as an abandoned and derelict structure. Used as a key site and backdrop in relation to friendship, reneged promises and revenge between two friends in the film, one perhaps senses traces of connections between once lofty but now-failed (and deathly) promises and betrayals of wealth and architecture, both on a national, familial and personal level. 

Or Charles Lim’s video artwork, SEASTATE 6 (2015), which shows us another cityscape that is relatively unfamiliar and not as visible, namely the Jurong Rock Caverns in Singapore. As a lift shaft descends into the deep layers of this particular cavern, we see metal pipe structures and steel scaffoldings accompanied by floodlights and blinking circuit boards. His work hence offers another notion of infrastructure as that of hidden and tucked away, yet hold liquid fuels crucial to sustaining the city-state. 

One also thinks of the artistic duo, Animali Domestici and their project, Bangkok Opportunistic Ecologies. Looking at Bangkok city from the perspective of pythons, they soon reveal interspecies cohabitation, as well as failing infrastructures such as cracked pipes, contaminated canals and trash. These reveal other infrastructures hidden from the everyday urban spaces, such as caves, pipes and wires, gases and their smells, or what Appadurai describes as ‘energies and miasmas that constitute urban infrastructure’ which are otherwise ‘dirty, dangerous and ugly’, but are at the same time defining characteristics of a modern city which while enabling life, also threaten to foil it (2015). 

Infrastructures as such, are not merely a matter of being visible or hidden. Rather, if they enable the life of a city, and guide a nation’s ambitions and imaginations towards a certain future, they are integral and crucial to the urban everyday life. What then happens when infrastructures fail, and what could it reveal about Southeast Asia’s peoples’ connections to infrastructures? How do these communities orientate their lives around these infrastructures, especially when access is denied to them? 

While infrastructures often seem to be associated with behemoth-scaled structures that are fixed to a location or country, they nevertheless seem to hold affinity towards the transnational, as one thinks about the Belt Road Initiative, or the imagined residents from across the world congregating in Malaysia’s Forest City. When infrastructures facilitate or at times, force or coerce mobilities and flows of people, migrants, goods, wealth and information, how does it shape our understandings and imaginations of crossing and connecting borders and territories in the region? In addition, infrastructure often seems to reside on land. But what happens when ‘amphibious’ infrastructures make their way across water bodies in Bangkok? Or how would food such as floating rice impact the formation of water infrastructures across the Chao Phraya delta? 

Furthermore, if infrastructures are also mediators of leisure and entertainment, including abandoned sites as fertile grounds for urban explorers, how does it impact the way we understand cultural flows and depictions of similarities and differences across race, language and even religion across Southeast Asia?