Publication Type

Journal Article

Version

publishedVersion

Publication Date

1-2025

Abstract

This article theorizes ‘state capitalist landscapes’ as a unique spatial form shaped by state-owned developers that reconcile economic goals with national development imperatives and symbolic national imaginaries. State capitalist landscapes, I argue, integrate economically productive spaces with natural spaces to symbolize imaginaries of the nation. Through an inductive case study methodology, this article surveys three industrial zones developed and/or under development by state owned developers: Singapore's Jurong, China's Xiong’an New Area, and Thailand's Wangchan Valley. In each of these cases, natural landscapes are integrated into new economic zones in order to construct specific symbolic and/or political imaginaries of the nation: Singapore's ‘garden city’, China's ‘ecological civilization’, and in Thailand the ‘sufficiency economy’. By bringing together work on ‘infrastructural landscapes’ and ‘state capitalism’ this paper provides a concrete material perspective to contemporary discussions of state capitalism, while also bringing more grounded, political and institutional perspectives to landscape infrastructure studies, which has tended to set aside discussions of institutional forms or national political dynamics in a focus on form and materiality of infrastructure landscapes worldwide.

Keywords

state, landscape, planning, Singapore, China

Discipline

Geography

Research Areas

Integrative Research Areas

Publication

Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography

Volume

46

Issue

1

First Page

95

Last Page

115

ISSN

0129-7619

Identifier

10.1111/sjtg.12574

Publisher

Wiley

Additional URL

https://doi.org/10.1111/sjtg.12574

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