Milica Topalović, Architecture of Territory. Beyond the Limits of the City: Research and Design of Urbanising Territories, ETH Zurich D-ARCH Architecture of Territory, 2016.

This essay is an adapted version of a paper published in New Geographies. Milica Topalović, ‘Beyond the Limits of the City: Urbanising Territories’, New Geographies 8 (2016): 164–75.

See: Rem Koolhaas, ‘OMA: On Progress’, lecture, London, 10 November 2011; Neil Brenner and Christian Schmid‚ ‘The “Urban Age” in Question’, International Journal for Urban and Regional Research 38, no. 3 (2014): 731–55; and Edward Glaeser, Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier and Happier (Penguin Press, 2011).

Koolhaas, ‘OMA: On Progress’.

Florian Hertweck, Christian Hiller, Markus Krieger, Alex Nehmer, Anh-Linh Ngo, Milica Topalović, eds., The Great Repair: Politics for the Repair Society (Spector Books, 2023).

Territorial approach has been developed by ETH Studio Basel, Christian Schmid and Milica Topalović. See Milica Topalović, ‘Eclipse: Beyond the City: Design Across Centre-Periphery’ On Architecture and the Greenfield: The Political Economy of Space vol. 2, ed. Charlotte Malterre-Barthes (Hatje Kantz, 2024), 115–47. See also Neil Brenner, ‘The Hinterland Urbanised?’, Architectural Design, 86, no. 4 (2016): 118–27.

Arturo Escobar, ‘On the Ontological Metrofitting of Cities’, e-flux architecture, July 2022, https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/where-is-here/453886/on-the-ontological-metrofitting-of-cities/.

Christian Schmid and Milica Topalović, eds., Extended Urbanisation: Tracing Planetary Struggles (Birkhaüser, 2023).

For a comprehensive discussion on the concept of hinterland, see for example William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (W W Norton & Company, 1991).

Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis.

See Neil Brenner and Christian Schmid, ‘Planetary Urbanization’, in Urban Constellations, ed. M. Gandy (Jovis Verlag, 2011), 10–13.

Nikos Katsikis, ‘The Horizontal Factory: The Operationalisation of the US Corn and Soy Belt’, in Extended Urbanisation: Tracing Planetary Struggles, ed. Christian Schmid and Milica Topalović (Birkhaüser, 2023).

Nikos Katsikis, From Hinterland to Hinterglobe: Territorial Organization Beyond Agglomeration (PhD Diss., Harvard, Cambridge, MA, 2016).

ETH Architecture of Territory is the Chair of Architecture and Territorial Planning at the ETH Zurich Department of Architecture, led by the author, Professor Milica Topalović. The research on Singapore’s hinterlands was conducted with the support of Singaporean National Research Foundation and the Future Cities Laboratory.

Hillary Angelo and David Wachsmuth, ‘Urbanizing Urban Political Ecology: A Critique of Methodological Cityism’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 39, no. 1 (2015).

For a primer on scholarship and artistic research on Singapore’s cross-border geographies see for example: Matthew Sparke, James D Sidaway, Tim Bunnell and Carl Grundy-Warr, ‘Triangulating the Borderless World: Geographies of Power in the Indonesia-Malaysia- Singapore Growth Triangle’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 29, no. 4 (2004): 485–98. Johan A Lindquist, The Anxieties of Mobility: Migration and Tourism in Indonesian Borderlands (University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2009). Joshua Comaroff, ‘Built on Sand: Singapore and the New State of Risk’, Harvard Design Magazine 39 (2014). Francis E Hutchinson and Terence Chong, eds., The SiJoRi Cross-Border Region: Transnational Politics, Economics and Culture (The ISEAS – Yusof Ishak Institute, 2016). See also the work of artists Zai Kuning and Charles Lim.

Sinnathamby Rajaratnam, ‘Singapore Global City’, Text of address by MR S RAJARATNAM, Minister for ‘Foreign Affairs to the Singapore Press Club on February 6, 1972 (Ministry of Culture, Singapore).

Beng Huat Chua, ‘Singapore as Model: Planning Innovations, Knowledge Experts’, in Worlding Cities: Asian Experiments and the Art of Being Global, ed. Ananya Roy and Aihwa Ong (Wiley-Blackwell, 2011).

The terms hard or developmental state were first introduced to describe state-led macroeconomic planning in Singapore as well as other East Asian countries including Japan, China, Thailand and South Korea in the 1960s and were later applied to other countries outside East Asia. They refer to a capitalist model in which the state displays both entrepreneurial and authoritarian characteristics, exerting more political autonomy and more control over the economy than in traditional capitalist states. Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek, following Peter Sloterdijk, credited Singaporean leader Lee Kwan Yew with conceiving and putting into practice ‘capitalism with Asian values’, now spreading throughout Asia and other parts of the world. See Slavoj Žižek, ‘Berlusconi in Teheran’, London Review of Books 31 no. 14 (23 July 2009): 3–7, http://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n14/slavoj-zizek/berlusconi-in-tehran. On the features of Singapore’s authoritarianism, see Chua, ‘Singapore as Model’.

See ‘Country Comparison > Population Density’, Index Mundi, 1 January 2014, http://www.indexmundi.com/g/r.aspx?v=21000; and ‘Swiss Federal Statistical Office > Regional Data > Cantons > Zurich > Key Figures’, 2014, http://www.bfs.admin.ch/bfs/portal/en/index/regionen/kantone/zh/key.html.

The idea of comparing Singapore and West Berlin in terms of accessibility comes from ETH Professor Kees Christiaanse, who generously offered it in a conversation with the author and two students, Magnus Nickl and Verena Stecher, at the ETH Future Cities Laboratory in Singapore in early 2013.

Magnus Nickl and Verena Stecher, ‘Sealand’ (Master’s thesis, ETH D-ARCH Architecture of Territory, SEC-FCL Singapore and ETH Zurich D-ARCH, 2014).

Milica Topalović, ‘Constructed Land: Singapore in the Century of Flattening’, in Constructed Land: Singapore, 1924–2012, ed. Uta Hassler and Milica Topalović (ETH Zurich D-ARCH and Singapore-ETH Centre, 2014), 56–57.

Chua, ‘Singapore as Model’, 30.

Aris Ananta, ‘The Population of the SIJORI Cross-Border Region’, in The SiJoRi Cross-Border Region: Transnational Politics, Economics and Culture, ed. Francis E Hutchinson and Terence Chong (The ISEAS – Yusof Ishak Institute, 2016), 49.

Milica Topalović, Architecture of Territory: Beyond the Limits of the City: Research and Design of Urbanising Territories, ETH Zurich D-ARCH Architecture of Territory, 2016.

Nitin Bathla, ed., Researching Otherwise: Pluriversal Methodologies for Landscape and Urban Studies (gta verlag, 2024). See also Topalović, ‘Eclipse’, 130–42.

On the metabolism of sand, see research publication, Hassler and Topalović, eds., Constructed Land.

Brenner and Schmid, ‘Planetary Urbanization’.

Abel Wolman, ‘The Metabolism of Cities’, Scientific American 213, no. 3 (1965): 179–90.

See Milica Topalović, Martin Knüsel, Marcel Jäggi and Stefanie Krautzig, eds., Hinterland: Singapore, Johor, Riau (studio report, ETH Zurich D-ARCH Architecture of Territory, ETH Zurich D-ARCH and Singapore-ETH Centre). The model of material flow analysis was outlined by Peter Baccini and Paul H Brunner in Metabolism of the Anthroposphere (Springer, 1991).

Bill Roberts, ‘Production in View: Allan Sekula’s Fish Story and the Thawing of Postmodernism’, Tate Papers, no. 18 (2012).

Jean Gottmann, Orbits: The Ancient Mediterranean Tradition of Urban Networks (Leopard’s Head Press, 1984), 3.

Gottmann, Orbits, 9-10.

For more on this topic, see Milica Topalović, ‘Palm Oil: A New Ethics of Visibility for the Production Landscape’, in Designing the Rural: A Global Countryside in Flux, ed. Christiane Lange, John Lin and Joshua Bolchover (John Wiley & Sons, 2016), 42–47.

Francisco Martínez, Martin D Frederiksen and Lili Di Puppo, introduction to Peripheral Methodologies: Unlearning, Not-Knowing and Ethnographic Limits, ed. Francisco Martínez, Martin D. Frederiksen and Lili Di Puppo (London: Routledge, 2021).

Gottmann, Orbits, 14.