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Governing Belonging: The Urban Social Contract
Governing Belonging: The Urban Social Contract
Issues in Migration and How Cities Grow
Cities are where people most directly encounter the state — through rights to urban services, housing, migration and work. As urban populations grow and diversify, belonging doesn’t just ‘happen’; it is built through legal recognition, policy design, and the systems that manage movement across borders. This Special Feature explores the urban social contract through three lenses: constitutional design, integration policy, and labour mobility and what they reveal about how city life is governed.
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On integration as a housing system
“I think we are the only country in the world to have this kind of integration, and it’s part and parcel of public housing”
Associate Professor of Law, Yong Pung How School of Law; Associate Dean (Undergraduate Curriculum and Teaching), Singapore Management University
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On migration as organised national infrastructure
“The Philippines … is a country that has sent out a lot of migrants. … What makes the Philippines quite unique is that it’s really very organised in its deployment of its own citizens to jobs outside the country.”
Associate Professor of Sociology, School of Social Sciences; Area Coordinator, Sociology, Singapore Management University
How Southeast Asia is making belonging more durable
In diverse societies, belonging is not based on sentiment alone — it is reinforced by the systems people share and the habits communities practise. For years, cohesion efforts across Southeast Asia leaned heavily on broad messaging, nation-building narratives, and community programmes. But denser cities, faster information flows, and repeated periods of social and economic stress have made one lesson harder to ignore: cohesion can look stable until everyday frictions are tested. That is why a practical shift is emerging. Increasingly, cohesion is treated as something that needs maintenance — through trust networks that work before tensions surface, clearer ways for residents to participate in local life, everyday mechanisms for resolving disputes early, and prevention programmes that reduce the risk of tensions escalating under stress. The examples in this panel show four tools being put into place across the region to strengthen the social contract in daily life.
Source: Learn more here
Perception and Reality In The Urban Context
In diverse cities, belonging is shaped by both systems and sentiment. Policies can be well-designed on paper — clear rules, fair access, integration mechanisms — yet the social contract still weakens if people perceive the system as uneven, unresponsive, or stacked against them. That gap between intent and experience matters because trust is built through day-to-day encounters: how services are delivered, how decisions are explained, and whether residents feel heard when tensions arise. In other words, cohesion is not only a matter of what cities do, but of whether people believe those systems work for them under pressure.