Brenda Yeoh: Migration and Urbanization in Asian Cities

Migration and urbanization in Asian cities are the field of Brenda Yeoh, a geographer at the National University of Singapore and one of the most cited researchers on human mobility in Asia. Her starting point is that cities such as Singapore, Hong Kong, Kuala Lumpur, Dubai or Seoul have grown thanks to millions of migrant workers to whom, at the same time, they deny belonging: they build the towers, care for children and older people and clean the streets, but live under temporary permits, without the right to settle or to bring their families. Yeoh has shown how that contradiction shapes the space, society and politics of Asian metropolises.

From colonial city to global city: contested space

Her first major work, Contesting Space in Colonial Singapore (1996), reconstructed how the British administration and the Chinese, Malay and Indian population fought over urban space in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: the colonial ordering of streets, markets, cemeteries and housing against the uses and resistances of residents. That approach, space as the outcome of negotiation and conflict between power and everyday life, runs through all her later work and connects the colonial city with the global city Singapore set out to become from the 1980s.

Migrant domestic workers: a disposable migration

With Shirlena Huang, Yeoh studied for two decades migrant domestic workers from the Philippines, Indonesia and Myanmar in Singapore. Their labour regime is the clearest example of what she calls the production of disposable migration: permits tied to one employer, prohibition of marriage or pregnancy, the obligation to live in the employer's home and repatriation when the contract ends. Yeoh showed how these women, invisible in public space six days a week, appropriate it on Sundays in parks, shopping malls and esplanades, creating temporary territories the city tolerates and polices at once.

Dormitories and pandemic: the geography of exclusion made visible

Construction workers from South Asia live a different segregation: dormitories on the industrial edges of the city, transport in lorries and restricted access to residential districts. The pandemic of 2020 made that system visible when infections soared in Singapore's dormitories and the government confined them for months while the rest of the city returned to normal. Yeoh and her colleagues read that episode as proof that the Asian global city rests on a geography of exclusion that is only seen when it fails.

Transnational families and the Asian migration system

Yeoh has widened the view to transnational families and intra-Asian migration. The children who grow up in the Philippines or Indonesia while their mothers care for other children in Singapore, the cross-border marriages between Singaporean men and Vietnamese women, the students and professionals circulating between Shanghai, Singapore and Sydney form a regional migration system that national policies manage by category: welcome and temporary, talent and labour. The Asian city, she argues, is produced in that sorting.

Her contribution to urban studies is twofold. She shows that Asian urbanization cannot be understood without the migration that builds and sustains it, and that migration policies are urban policies: they decide who lives where, with what rights and for how long. And she proposes an ethics of the city that recognises those who make it work, with rights of residence, family reunification and access to housing and services. Without that recognition, she warns, the Asian global city will remain prosperous for some and provisional for those who build it.