Waterfront as Accumulation Strategy: Urban Greening, Real Estate Making, and the Assetization of Water

This study returns to the beginning of Singapore’s waterfront development program to reveal how urban greening, property development, and new-build gentrification dovetailed over three decades, closing with recent plans for the Greater Southern Waterfront. All over the world, urban waterfronts have been reoriented from industrial to leisure activities, enabling the shift to a service- and property-based economy. Fine-grained historical studies of how urban greening facilitates this socioeconomic transformation hold immediate relevance for contemporary critique of green-blue infrastructure, which, as an urban planning and design intervention, is premised on the assetization of nature. Waterfront development was integral to urban renewal in Singapore, making available, via large-scale capital switching, high-value land for real estate markets, further consolidating the government’s position as a property state, precipitating environmental gentrification. The article demonstrates that waterfronts have provided a novel platform for entrepreneurial governance and planning liberalization, emphasizing that rollout of green-blue infrastructure, which Singapore pioneered in the 1990s, was driven by political economic objectives—urban regeneration, property upgrading, economic diversification—more than urban sustainability. It is contended that state authorities assetized water, capitalizing its unique biophysical properties, to unlock new accumulation opportunities on the waterfront, providing the metabolic basis of land and real estate financialization.