A ‘City in Nature’ and its porcine interlopers: Confronting the edges of urban ecological order

Initiatives intended to manage urban environments as functional ecosystems are on the rise globally. Approaching city land as terrain that might, if properly cultivated, provide human residents with prioritized ecosystem services and benefits, such efforts take a decidedly instrumental approach to these landscapes. Critical geographers have emphasized the biopolitical dimensions of these interventions, foregrounding the imbrication of other-than-human nature in state-led projects of securing the conditions for (particular forms of) human life. Through a case study of human-wild boar entanglements in Singapore, this article examines the limits and moments of breakdown that mark efforts to mobilize urban terrain and inhabitants in this manner. Tracing the disordering effects of a largely unwanted species that has flourished in landscapes increasingly scripted as vital natural infrastructure for the city-state, the account demonstrates the confounding, disruptive potential of projects intended to rationalize complex urban ecologies for anthropocentric ends.