2012 NUS Geography (Hons.) 

2015 NUS Geography (MSocSci.).

2019 University College London, Geography (PhD)

2020- Assistant Professor, NUS Geography

Main courses taught

GE3204 Cities and Regions: Planning for Change (Semester 1)

GE4204 New Geographies of Urban Theory (Semester 2)

Other courses taught

GE3219 Globalisation and the Asian Cities

Teaching Philosophy

University education is an opportunity for students to become empathic learners. Empathy in learning involves attunement to self and others, nonjudgmental interactions, and recognition of the importance of collaborative knowledge production. If successful it should foster cognitive and emotional reflexivity and flexibility to develop deeper, contextually specific solutions to problems. As a discipline that requires its practitioners to be deeply embedded with the real world, I believe a geographical education provides a platform for students to practice learning with empathy. More geography majors are aspiring to careers beyond the usual suspects in the state sector. They are also aspiring to do more socially engaged work that makes a difference. The quality of NUS geography graduates must thus lie not solely in their conceptual mastery, but in how they make themselves relevant to the fast-changing world by becoming empathic learners.

Awards

I received the NUS FASS Faculty Teaching Excellence Award in AY20/21 and AY21/22.

I welcome prospective graduate students working in the broad fields of critical urban geography and planning to contact me for further discussion.

I am interested in supervising students who wish to work on the following themes: urban governance, urban informality, urban social movements, state-society relations, volumetric urbanism, public space and publicness, liveability play, and hapiness. I am particularly interested in students who wish to adopt a qualitative, comparative methodology in their research, looking to theorise from/ with Asian case studies based in East and Southeast Asia.

Prospective applicants are encouraged to contact me in good time ahead of the department's deadlines for graduate studies application (1 November and 15 May). Please contact me well in advance before the department's deadlines to establish interest and suitability.

Urban informality from the global East: Comparing comparisons in Taipei and Singapore

Rapid urbanisation has seen the emergence of urban informalities, which are subject to regulation by states to create (aestheticised) conditions for urban transformation and capital accumulation. Nonetheless, informality can be seen as a logic of governance and control, as well as contestation and collaboration through which state and society actors negotiate spatial claims and extant social, economic and political interests. Informality is thus not simply a byproduct but an idiom of urbanisation. It is fundamentally productive of the city. This research proposes an experimental comparison between urban informalities in Taipei and Singapore, investigating the ways and sites in which informal practices operate and materialise in the context of East Asian developmental states and their urbanisation. Empirical cases from East Asia are thus treated as resources for theorising the nexus between governance-politics-informality in contexts of urbanisation beyond the global North and South, producing more generalisable insight on the informal logics of urbanisation. 

Taipei

State authorities have long been interested in regulating the operations of night markets since their emergence in the 1950s following Taiwan’s economic miracle. Nonetheless, the attitudes of city-level authorities towards night markets have nuanced over the years, ranging from forceful removal to an acknowledgement of their social, cultural and economic role as part of the city’s urban fabric. Night markets thus not only continue to be frequented by residents for their daily needs, but have also become important resources for urban placemaking. That is not to say that the authorities do not try to control night market operations, as they continue to try to demarcate designated spaces to contain their operations, with police enforcements and hygiene checks. Should conflicts arise, such as between residents and vendors, the local authorities may even act as mediators to establish common understandings or regulate errant operations. Most night markets also have self-governing associations, made up of vendors who pay membership fees to maintain the cleanliness and orderliness of the night market. Nonetheless, night markets continue to be sites of politics not only between vendors and state authorities, but also between vendors and nearby residents. 

I focus on two night markets in Taipei to compare the governance of informalities. The first is Shilin night market, a well-known landscape in Taipei that is jointly managed by Taipei’s Markets Administration Office and the Shilin night market self-governing association. City authorities have played a huge role in revamping and promoting Shilin night market as a top tourist attraction. Nonetheless, the mixed implications of the state’s interest in managing and producing ‘informality’ on the everyday operations of the night market require further examination, especially with Shilin experiencing a sharp decline since the pandemic. Furthermore, the nuanced dynamic between police officers and illegal vendors, particularly the performance of abidance by illegal vendors, negotiations and implicit tolerance can provide interesting empirics on the informal constitution of night market regulation in practice. 

In comparison, nested among blocks of public social housing is Nanjichang night market, which is well-loved by local residents for the affordability of the goods sold. However, division-level officers have called out city-level authorities such as the Taipei City Market Administration Office for inadequately regulating illegal hawking activities, though officers from the Taipei City Market Administration Office have cited the absence of complaints from nearby residents to nuance the severity of the issue. As the precinct where Nanjichang night market is located has been undergoing urban regeneration since 2018, there is potential to explore the extent to which dynamics between different governmental authorities, vendors and residents surrounding the everyday operations of the night market have changed. Overall, the blurring of boundaries between formality and informality in how night markets are managed and even nuances in the dynamics of governance between the night markets offer potential to tease out nuanced insights on informality as a practice of governance. 

Singapore

Known for its highly sanitised, curated and regulated urban environment, the traditional connotations of disorder associated with informalities seem to not have a place in Singapore. Nonetheless, authorities such as the Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA) have been encouraging community participation, such as residents or schools, in enlivening public spaces in collaboration with the state. Though ground-up ideas are still subject to regulations, increased opportunities for public engagement and community-initiated projects seem to suggest room for certain state-led ‘informalisations’ of urban planning and placemaking practices (McFarlane 2012). My research will focus on three state-sanctioned projects which provide platforms for the informal constitution of urban governance and placemaking in Singapore.

The first involves examining the projects by Participate in Design (P!D), a local non-profit organisation that advocates a participatory design approach engaging various stakeholders in a community, such as residents and businesses, in the design of creations to improve the longevity of their use. Over the years, P!D’s journey from an informal community group in 2013 to a non-profit organisation in the present-day that mainly works on participatory placemaking or estate rejuvenation projects commissioned by state agencies and private corporations, is also telling of the growing acknowledgement of its bottom-up approach by various institutions. To generate a sense of community ownership, P!D usually organises discussions with various stakeholders to understand their needs, before trying to creatively involve residents in contextual-specific ways when actualising ideas, such as co-creating artworks that residents have decided on. That said, the risk of tokenism and managing the top-down thinking of some clients remains a challenge that the P!D team face in their work. There is potential to explore how the ‘informalisation’ of urban planning functions as part of the state’s urban planning approach to account for the needs of the people and potential politics surrounding the experimental projects.

The second involves Business Improvement District (BID) pilots launched under the ambit of the 2019 URA Masterplan. Business Improvement Districts (BIDs) are delineated coalitions formed to enhance the vibrancy and attractiveness of targeted precincts through strategic marketing, hospitality, events and developments. They are place management models originally adopted in the UK and US (Ward, 2007). The goal of the government is to provide a collaborative platform for various stakeholders including businesses and local communities to take the lead in creating new and enhancing current opportunities for business, residential, recreational, leisure and entertainment offerings in these precincts. Ten pilot BIDs will enable the government to assess the feasibility of this collaborative development model to provide a dynamic mechanism for the re-valorisation of the city’s most important spaces and to inform urban innovation, development and growth in Singapore more generally. 

I focus on the conceptualisation and implementation of plans and projects within the Tanjong Pagar BID and Marina Bay BID, which are respectively the city’s original and new Central Business Districts. GuocoLand, one of Singapore’s largest developers and an anchor tenant in Tanjong Pagar, has been organising activities alongside other stakeholders at its flagship integrated mixed-use project, Tanjong Pagar Centre. When it unveiled its 150,000 sq ft Urban Park as part of the development in October 2017, the developer started programming community fitness, lifestyle, music and family-friendly activities in order to develop community interest in contributing to the development of the precinct. Similarly, The Marina Bay Alliance was created to encourage private and community stakeholders to work together to take on a more active role in transforming their precinct and activating its surrounding public spaces. The enlistment of private and public participation has not been straightforward, with stakeholders citing funding and organisational issues, as well as the general apathy of the Singaporean public as potential roadblocks to be negotiated.

Finally, I focus on the Lively Places Fund and Programme sanctioned by the Housing Development Board. The state encourages residents to initiate community-driven place-making projects that will help develop more vibrant and bonded communities. These projects are conceptualised by residents and different tiers of funding are available on a once-off basis, on the condition that these projects seek to foster community ties among residents staying in the same precinct. Projects have included community gardening; promoting wellness amongst seniors; celebrating diversity and inclusivity; promoting community cohesion; community art and revamping citizens’ corners. Negotiations are required not just with state officers such as from the Town Council surrounding how certain public spaces can be used, but also among residents who may have different interests. Particularly, despite a number of projects being helmed by Resident Committees, which are affiliated to state institutions, the everyday maintenance of some of the projects are oftentimes characterised by experimentation and spontaneity on the ground. Given the positionalities of Resident Committee volunteers who are residents tasked with state-affiliated responsibilities of maintaining harmony, there is potential to explore the open-endedness in what the projects can become and the extent to which informality as a practice can be enmeshed in the regulatory context of Singapore. 

Research questions and academic significance
A growing number of works from the global South have challenged the conception of informality as places, peoples and activities outside of formal state control by studying informality as a mode of insurgency (Roy 2009). Here informality refers to practices that respond to state dominance, and those that are counter-hegemonic, transgressive and imaginative. Informality is afforded by the incompleteness of formal urban systems, which are seen to be characterised by gaps, cracks, and exceptions that can be leveraged by the marginalised to inhabit, reshape and rewrite spaces and places of urbanisation (Yiftachel 2006).

In the context of East Asian cities, however, a combination of strong states and weak rights has limited the potential for resistance (Waley 2016). Scholars reading from East Asia have thus highlighted the variegated state-informality nexus where informality is often part of the constitution of states and through which spatial claims are negotiated and collaborated on rather than resisted (Teo 2022). Here, exploring informality as an idiom of urbanisation, a logic of control and everyday practice (Bunnell and Harris 2012) can possibly illuminate new understandings of state-society dynamics and the role of informality as embedded in urban governance, placemaking and transformation (Jin and Zhao 2022). At the same time, the rise of participatory planning practices in East Asia that involve urban dwellers in constructing neighbourhoods and livelihoods and the informal politics that surface have been argued to be constitutive of formal urban planning practices, though whether, how and to what ends they exemplify an informalisation of urban planning require further examination (McFarlane 2012). 

To develop more nuanced accounts of the relationship between urban governance, transformation and informality, the proposed research aims to address four main questions:

1. How do state and society actors perceive, negotiate and operate urban informalities at an everyday level?
2. To what extent might such negotiations inspire new institutional dynamics of urban governance?
3. What can we learn from the differences in how the informal governance and development within and between both cities play out? 
4. How can we learn differently about urban informality through reading (comparatively) from cases within and between East Asian cities?

The answers to these questions contribute to the variegated relations between the state, society and informality in contemporary East Asian cities. They can potentially offer more nuanced insights into the relationship between informality, urban governance and politics beyond existing understandings of informality as a/n (negative) urban condition and/ or a resistance against dominant state practices. The project will advance connections across critical urban studies and post-colonial urban geography by reading from the global East.

Research approach and feasibility

The research employs a mixed-methods qualitative approach. Texts such as policy documents and popular media will be studied as they frame and are framed by the development of informalities. Semi-structured interviews will also be conducted with a range of possible stakeholders: policymakers, planners, developers, consultants, corporations and their staff, civil society groups, residents and the public. Participant observation will be employed to gain insights to the daily operations and governance of the informalities in question.

This research will also adopt an experimental comparative methodology in two parts. The first step involves intra-urban comparison (i.e., comparing between cases within the same urban context (Taipei and Singapore respectively); this is followed by inter-urban comparison (i.e., comparison between Taipei and Singapore). This step-ladder methodology will allow thinking through the differences of ‘seemingly incomparable’ case studies as they unfold, surfacing important questions and findings which can allow for unexpected analytical pathways and unanticipated conceptual outcomes (Lancione & McFarlane 2016). This method will allow me to tease out both heterogeneous and generalisable alternative imaginaries, practices and outcomes of urban governance and transformation embedded in informality as I follow the cases in action. It will also produce insight on the differences and connections between intra- and inter-urban comparisons as comparative tactics, as well as their analytical purchase and conceptually generative potential (McFarlane et al. 2017).

References

Bunnell, T., & Harris, A. (2012). Re-viewing informality: perspectives from urban Asia. International Development Planning Review, 34(4).

Jin, Y., & Zhao, Y. (2022). The Informal Constitution of State Centrality: Governing Street Businesses in (Post‐) Pandemic Chengdu, China. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 46(4), 631-650.

Lancione, M. and McFarlane, C. (2016). Life at the urban margins: Sanitation infra-making and the potential of experimental comparison. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 48(12), pp.2402-2421.

McFarlane, C. (2012). Rethinking informality: Politics, crisis, and the city. Planning Theory & Practice, 13(1), 89-108.

McFarlane, C., Silver, J., & Truelove, Y. (2017). Cities within cities: intra-urban comparison of infrastructure in Mumbai, Delhi and Cape Town. Urban Geography, 38(9), 1393-1417.

Roy, A. (2009). Strangely familiar: Planning and the worlds of insurgence and informality. Planning Theory, 8(1), 7-11.

Teo, S. S. K. (2022). Shared projects and symbiotic collaborations: Shenzhen and London in comparative conversation. Urban Studies, 59(8), 1694-1714.

Waley, P. (2016). Speaking gentrification in the languages of the Global East. Urban Studies, 53(3), 615-625.

ARTICLES IN JOURNALS

• Teo, S. S. K. (2022). Shared projects and symbiotic collaborations: Shenzhen and London in comparative conversation. Urban Studies, 59(8), 1694-1714.
• Teo, S. S. K. (2021). Localism partnerships as informal associations: The work of the Rural Urban Synthesis Society and Lewisham Council within austerity. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 46(1), 163-178.
• Teo, S. S. K. 2014 Political tool or quality experience? Urban livability and the Singaporean State’s global city aspirations. Urban Geography 35(6) 916-937

BOOK REVIEWS

• Teo 2015 Worlding Cities: Asian Experiments and the Art of Being Global eds. Roy A and Ong A. Blackwell: UK. Urban Studies 52(2) 401-403

THESES/DISSERTATIONS

• 2019 University College London: Symbiotic states and progressive projects—Shenzhen and London in comparative conversation.

OTHERS

• Teo 2019 City Impact: UABB in Retrospect Volume 52-54 (Leading quarterly magazine in architecture and urban design)

Service

Reviewer for Asian Geographer; CITY; Environment and Planning: A; Geoforum; International Journal of Urban and Regional Research; Journal of Higher Education in Geography; Journal of Urban Affairs; Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography; Social & Cultural Geography; Territory, Politics and Governance; Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers; Tourist Studies; Urban Geography

Awards

2022 NUS FASS Faculty Teaching Excellence Award

2021 NUS FASS Faculty Teaching Excellence Award

2020 NUS FASS Start-up Grant. Value: S$80,000

2017 NUS Overseas Graduate Scholarship. 

2016 Chinese Government Scholarship.

2016-2018 University College London, Graduate Research Scholarship.

2015 University College London, Overseas Research Scholarship.

2015 NUS Graduate Student Teaching Award, AY 14-15 Semester 1

2014 NUS Graduate Student Teaching Award, AY 13-14 Semester 2

2014-2015 NUS, Graduate Student Teaching Scholarship.

2012 NUS Dean’s List AY 11-12 Semester 2

2010 NUS Dean’s List AY 09-10 Semester 2