Online Lecture

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The (Trans)Urban Migration Industry: ‘Migration Products’ and Speculative Urbanisation at Iskandar Malaysia

 by Dr. Sin Yee Koh, School of Arts and Social Sciences at Monash University Malaysia

Iskandar Malaysia (IM) is a 4,749km² urban conurbation and development region located at the Malaysia-Singapore border. State-led development of this regional economic corridor has attracted inflows of foreign investments and spurred the rise of mid- to high-end urban developments by foreign developers. This has resulted in the emergence of a (trans)urban migration industry consisting of intermediary entities that are co-developing and co-marketing ‘migration products’ (real estate, education, and lifestyle migration) as an integrated package to middle-class and affluent migrants from the region. In this talk, I will put forth the argument that the industry’s entrepreneurial pursuits are complicit in transforming the urban into spaces of transnational consumption; and that, together with state actors, the industry co-shapes the transnational and micro-urban geographies in/through IM. An urban-focused lens can shed light on how the promotion of consumption-led mobility by the migration industry contributes to the production of transnational urbanism in the context of speculative urbanism.

Short Bio

Sin Yee Koh is Senior Lecturer in Global Studies in the School of Arts and Social Sciences at Monash University Malaysia. Her work is informed by three areas of interest: (1) migration/mobilities and citizenship; (2) urbanisation and inequality; and (3) postcolonial geography. She has published on the globalisation of real estate, property tourism, and intermediaries of the super-rich.

Moderation

This lecture will be introduced and moderated by Tabea Bork-Hüffer and Katja Kaufmann from Innsbruck University.