Enclave encounters: Transient migrants as spatial mediators in Paya Lebar, Singapore

This paper examines migrant placemaking through the production and maintenance of a weekend migrant enclave in Singapore. By highlighting migrants’ encounters with the state and co-migrants, I analyze how informal encounters are embedded with surveillance practices in the enclave. I contribute to the literature on urban encounters by arguing that encounters function as surveillance in these spaces, where low-waged migrants are actively engaging in boundary-making practices. Their encounters are not only with surveillance technology and actors of state agencies such as the police but also with other migrants in the community. Drawing upon qualitative data collected in Paya Lebar, a neighborhood in the east side of Singapore, I locate the sites of encounter at the levels of policy regulation and the everyday in shared spaces where branches of the state such as surveillance technologies, auxiliary police officers and new migrants encounter one another on weekends. Making and managing the enclave are marked by layered forms of surveillance that both subvert and reinforce dominant modes of belonging through encounters in place. The enclave is not an exceptional space, nor are migrants exceptional. Rather, the encounters in the enclave are a distillation of broader migrant surveillance in the city.