Modernist Infrastructure and the Vital Systems Security of Water: Singapore’s Pluripotent Climate Futures

Singapore climate change adaptation planning for water infrastructure is assessed against the concept of “vital security systems.” Cast against the historicity of water planning and postcolonial urbanism, water supply, coastal protection, and flood control are understood in terms of vigilance, emergency, prediction, and control. It is argued that climate adaptation planning relies on a naturalistic understanding of predictable, linear transformations in base climatic variables and thus fails to take into consideration the “pluripotency” of climate futures—that is, the inherent unpredictability of nonlinear transformations that arise in the conjunction of human and nonhuman systems.