Civic Resilience Laboratory

Presentation: Urban Liminality, Resilience and Becoming: Migrant Volleyball in Singapore’s Interstitial Urbanism

Every Sunday, a forgotten pocket of vacant land at Old Terminal Lane in Kallang transforms into a vibrant hub we call the ‘volleyball scene’.  Up to 200 migrant domestic workers, primarily from the Philippines and Indonesia, converge on this interstitial site to play volleyball, carving an urban commons from Singapore’s hyper-regulated cityscape. Drawing on eight years of ethnography, this paper reads the scene as a paradigmatic case of ‘messy resilience’ –  bottom-up adaptation produced through everyday practices at the urban margins.

We use the term ‘volleyball scene’ to capture the fact that this is a generative social space that spans geographically, temporally and technologically far beyond mere volleyball games.  We argue that the ‘messy’ social resilience afforded by the volleyball is not an individual attribute but an infrastructural and collective process. Extending Hall’s migrant urbanisms, Klinenberg’s social infrastructure, and Meeus et al.’s arrival infrastructures, we develop the concept of infrastructures of resilience and becoming: improvised assemblages of place, embodied play, digital platforms (Facebook, TikTok, WhatsApp), and transnational ties that sustain networks of care, visibility, and agency.

Kallang, however, is slated for redevelopment. Paternalistic proposals to relocate players to purpose-built, rule-bound courts strip away the ecosystem the site affords. The paper closes by asking: what is lost when the informal is formalised, and how might planners design for messiness rather than against it?

Keywords: Urban commons; interstitial spaces; social resilience; public space; migrant domestic workers; Singapore

Bio: Amanda Wise is Professor of Sociology affiliated with the University of Technology Sydney (UTS), School of Design and Society. A pioneer of the theoretical field of ‘everyday multiculturalism’, she uses ethnographic methods to research how lived diversities shape the urban commons in global cities. Her research spans migration, urban multiculturalism, the gig economy, and informal sport among migrant communities. She is author of Exile and Return among the East Timorese and co-editor of Everyday Multiculturalism. With Kristine Aquino and Selvaraj Velayutham, she produced the documentary visual ethnography On Sundays, We Play, drawing on eight years of research with migrant domestic worker volleyballers in an interstitial pocket of Singapore. Selvaraj Velaytham is Associate Professor in the Discipline of Sociology at Macquarie University whose research focuses on migration, multiculturalism, race and ethnicity, and the sociology of everyday life. He has published widely on everyday multiculturalism, race relations, racism and anti-racism in Singapore. Kristine Aquino is Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Design and Society at the University of Technology Sydney, Australia. Her research examines migration and mobilities across Asia and Australia, with a particular focus on Filipino migration, migrant urbanisms in global cities, and ethnographies of race and racism.