Brenda Yeoh

Yeoh works on a contradiction that defines Singapore, Hong Kong, Dubai and Seoul: they are cities that depend on foreign labour to function and that simultaneously design their legal systems to prevent that labour from settling. Visas tied to one employer, bans on bringing family, contracts that expire, dormitories on the outskirts. The migrant is indispensable and temporary by rule.

Her contribution is to show how this is inscribed in space. Worker dormitories are where nobody sees them; domestic workers live inside someone else's house with no room of their own; and on Sunday, their single day off, they occupy parks, footbridges and lobbies en masse, turning ordinary public spaces into their own territory for a few hours. That weekly use is one of the most studied urban phenomena in Hong Kong and Singapore.

A geographer at the National University of Singapore, where she holds a Provost's Chair and directed the Asia Research Institute, Yeoh is among the most cited researchers in the world on migration and the city. She began with urban history: Contesting Space in Colonial Singapore (1996) reconstructs the conflicts over the use of the street between the British administration and the Chinese and Malay population.

Her later work covers talent migration, transnational marriages, families separated across borders for years, and return. Her overall conclusion is that Asia's so-called global cities were built not only with capital and infrastructure but with a very precise migration regime, and that this regime is as much part of their urbanism as their towers.