The nothingness of surplus territory: unearthing the real abstraction of Singapore’s geographic expansion

After six decades of geographic growth, Singapore has expanded by 154 kilometres, importing hundreds of millions of tonnes of sand from all over Southeast Asia at great geomorphic and ecological cost in the process. In 2019, Prime Minister announced that the city-state will spend 1 billion dollars a year until 2100 to mitigate sea level rise, with at least 200 more square kilometres to reclaim from the sea. This article investigates the impetus behind this relentless form of geographic growth, and how sand’s granular materiality became a real abstraction that has transformed the city-state’s spatial governance through the accumulation of surplus territory. It probes the ‘nothingness’ of the real abstraction through which surplus territory is realized, and in the process determines how this slippage between economic and geographic growth was enacted. Nothingness is posed as an ideological inscription that facilitates the accumulation of surplus territory upon the city-state’s existing geography, which is increasingly determined by this mode of geographic expansion.