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WORLD CITIES SUMMIT 2026

Pigs in the City: How Humans Can Coexist with the Wild

Background

Singapore has labelled itself a “Garden City”, a “City in a Garden” and most recently a “City in Nature”. Each moniker is associated with systematic efforts to cultivate urban space through targeted greening. But wild boars complicate this narrative. When a boar wandered into a Yishun public housing estate in 2022, causing injury before being captured and “humanely euthanised”, it exemplified a recurring pattern: urban nature, carefully engineered for human benefit, producing unintended and disruptive multispecies encounters.

Texas offers a parallel case. Explosive metropolitan growth across the Austin, Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston and San Antonio corridor — the Texas Triangle — has pushed development into formerly rural landscapes, while intensifying water scarcity has driven large-scale reservoir construction. These storage infrastructures fuel urbanisation but simultaneously create ideal habitat for feral hogs.

Together, these cases show how attempts to design orderly urban ecosystems generate messy multispecies entanglements that expose the limits of technocratic approaches to urban ecological governance.

Singapore: The Limits of Ecological Governance

Wild boars have quietly recolonised Singapore’s reserves, thriving in the very green corridors the state cultivated. Their rooting destroys forest regeneration; wallowing destabilises catchment infrastructure. Colonial-era oil palm invasives fuel their population growth, layering historical landscape disturbances onto contemporary management ambitions. Wildlife managers acknowledge uncertainty about the species’ ecological role, undermining confident population control.

The boars also disrupt efforts to govern human-animal relations. Residents feed pigs out of affection, defying escalating fines and surveillance. Environmental groups contest culling. Other residents demand more aggressive killing. These divergent responses expose the limits of the state’s prescribed respectful-but-distant interspecies relationship, revealing urban ecological governance as perpetually contested and incomplete.

Texas: Contested Infrastructural Ecologies

Texas reservoirs were built from the mid-20th century to fuel explosive metropolitan growth. These manmade lakes unlocked suburban development but also created ideal feral hog habitat. With at least four million hogs roaming the state, their populations and Texas’s urban sprawl have expanded in troubling parallel, drawing people and pigs into increasingly frequent contact. Hogs, by rooting and wallowing, physically degrade reservoir infrastructure — crumbling constructed wetland walls, disrupting stormwater basins — and contaminate stored water through bacterial loading and erosion. Their range extends far beyond storage sites, destroying suburban lawns, golf courses and agricultural fields.

Residents and agencies invest heavily in trapping, shooting and fencing, with limited success. The water agencies’ watershed protection plans increasingly designate hog management as a shared public responsibility. The reservoirs built to secure urbanisation have unintentionally seeded its disruption. As Texas plans further storage expansion, feral hog entanglements will likely deepen, signalling the broader importance of multispecies thinking for understanding resource storage within processes of capitalist urbanisation.

Conclusion

Assistant Professor Sayd Randle says: “Singapore and Texas join places across the globe in engineering orderly urban ecosystems that subvert and exceed best-laid plans. In both cases, disruptive species are not external threats but products of the engineered landscapes themselves — unintentional natures flourishing through, rather than despite, technocratic intervention, revealing the limits of attempts to fully control and order urban nature.”

Funding organisation: SMU Urban Institute

Read more about this study:
A ‘City in Nature’ and its porcine interlopers: Confronting the edges of urban ecological order
Wild hogs in the water: Contested infrastructural ecologies of reservoir storage in Texas