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Note: This event will take place on 6/23 at 11:00 AM CEST (Innsbruck time).

Iskandar Malaysia (IM) is a 4,749 square-kilometer 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, speaker Dr. Sin Yee Koh 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.

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) urbanization and inequality; and (3) postcolonial geography. She has published on the globalization of real estate, property tourism, and intermediaries of the super-rich.

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