Planning Mobility between Singapore and Suzhou

“There is no place like Suzhou. No, not Venice, not Amsterdam… Suzhou is a small-scaled city, [and] a human-scaled city.”

I.M. Pei (I.M. Pei: Building China Modern, 2010)

Whilst 2018 marks the 25th anniversary since the birth of the China-Singapore Suzhou Industrial Park (hereafter, SIP), a collaborative inter-governmental project whereby Singapore’s planning knowledge and praxis have been mobilised into Suzhou, this research situates itself in this project’s unique planning contexts, and seeks to uncover SIP’s planning outcomes and implications.

Via amalgamating existing writings about this project, interviews with a local planning official representative and local residents, as well as personal encounters based on participant observation, this dissertation seeks to explore the possibility to reconceptualise SIP’s planning outcomes through a bottom-up approach with an explicit emphasis on people and people’s experience instead of heavily relying on the top-down and government-centric narrative. Through various and seemingly contradictory spatial themes, namely global and local, public and private, formal and informal, this dissertation also presents different aspects of SIP’s planning outcomes with both convergence and divergence in relation to urban planning in Singapore. Moreover, by employing a postcolonial lens, four key implications in relation to the wider mobility literature were discussed, namely planning mobility’s context dependency, the inevitable selectivity and partiality embedded, the importance of being attentive to planning processes instead of the project solely, as well as critical engagement with struggles in operationalising postcolonial urbanism in reality.