Spatio‐legal legacies of wastewater surveillance: Biopolitical lawscapes and migrant workers

Abstract What will be the potential geographic legacy or transformative contribution of public health surveillance in the aftermath of the COVID‐19 pandemic? Using a critical legal geographical approach that combines the theoretical concepts of biopolitics and lawscaping, this paper studies the deployment of wastewater surveillance on the low‐skilled migrant worker community in Singapore during the COVID‐19 pandemic as a means of investigating future possibilities, concerns, and contestations about the evolving spatio‐legality of public health surveillance and the regulation of disease. The migrant worker community in Singapore has long been considered vital to the city‐state’s wealthy and highly developed status. At the same time, this community has also faced numerous challenges that other populations in Singapore have not (e.g. employment precarity, appropriate housing standards), which came to the forefront during the COVID‐19 pandemic. The Singaporean government responded to the pandemic by implementing a public health surveillance assemblage, of which the collection and monitoring of sewage played a significant part. In framing wastewater surveillance as a biopolitical technique of lawscaping, this paper implicates three interconnected effects of its deployment within the migrant worker population—through their lives , spaces , and personhood —and how this relates to state care and control. In exploring these effects, the paper positions the potential spatio‐legal legacy of wastewater surveillance as one that may contribute to the quotidian realities of surveillance that vulnerable urban populations face, but in a way that can also democratise their inhabitation of urban space while responding to gaps in critical health care.