Sin City Retrofit: Calibrated Marginality and the Reconstructing of Johor-Singapore Urban Vice Topographies as Anticipatory Truth Spots

Cities are fascinating sites for multifaceted layers of the urban milieu. Among these, ”urban vice”, characterized as activities with negative social and moral connotations, are often examined through the lenses of formal urban institutions, processes and governance in explaining why and how it persists. Using fieldwork and interview findings from sex work and poker home-game activities within Johor-Singapore urban vice topographies, I present a different but complementary reading of how urban vice for Singaporeans is also managed and sustained through specific operations and dynamics of urban informalities by vice agents, termed as ’calibrated marginality’.,Defined as producing tolerable nuisance, I show how calibrated marginality are used to sustain Singapore urban vice activities and their futures through the reconstructing and retrofitting of Johor Bahru into urban vice topographies that serve Singaporeans’ needs. I first unpack how vice agents use calibrated marginality through access and avoidance strategies, outsourced fronting technologies, and the ’gigification’ of vice syndication, to produce vice activities which remain barely visible or accessible while evading the legibility of surveillance. Calibrated marginality therefore enables vice activities to be rendered within sight, but not enough to warrant action by anti-vice authorities.,Next, by reading Johor-Singapore urban vice topographies into promissory urbanisms as anticipatory truth spots, I contend that calibrated marginality also operate as practices of fictitious expectations, producing anticipatory deferments and anxieties by authorities and local residents respectively. These responses, along with calibrated marginality, signify the chronopolitical emergence of Johor-Singapore urban vice topographies as part of Singapore’s urban vice futures.