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: 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.