SAANZ Conference 2024

Chair: Jordan Dougherty

Jasper Wei Yuan Tan
Progress or Panopticon? How Singapore's smart city drives state surveillance

This project examines how Singapore’s smart city framework facilitates biometric surveillance, raising concerns about privacy, autonomy, and state control. While smart cities are often seen as enhancing efficiency and security, they also enable state and corporate monitoring of citizens. Current research highlights the technological benefits of smart cities but tends to overlook how such frameworks contribute to the growth and normalisation of surveillance, particularly in highly state-managed environments like Singapore. Singapore was chosen to address this gap, particularly because it was an early pioneer in adopting digital technologies, such as the Electronic Road Pricing (ERP) system, and the ongoing development of its Smart Nation initiative, which contributes to expanding the country’s surveillance apparatus. This analysis involves a qualitative investigation of government policies, news media articles, and public data sources relating to Singapore’s surveillance and digitalisation efforts, aligning significantly with the smart city framework. State policies and surveillance technologies intensify state control, normalising the trade-off between security and individual privacy in pursuing technological progress and a safer society. Despite their promise of innovation and efficiency, this research provides a critical lens of how smart city frameworks function as tools for enhancing state surveillance, with profound implications for privacy and civil liberties.

Save Dunedin Live Music: Dave Bennett, Fairleigh Gilmour and Hugh Harlow
Sound and the city: a discussion of class by activists who #planfornoise

In this presentation, Save Dunedin Live Music will explore why examination of class needs to be central to activism around noise and space in the city. Drawing from Shane Homan’s work on pub rock in Australia, and our own experiences as activists here in Ōtepoti Dunedin, we will outline why class is fundamental to understanding people, space and the future of our city – in terms of access, regulation and decision-making around ‘noise’.