This paper unravels contemporary patterns of Chinese infrastructure development in Malaysia, a key Southeast Asian state. The paper argues that Chinese investment is instrumental in invigorating the Malaysian economy, helping the country achieve its development goals. Chinese support is especially useful in the wake of economic uncertainty and political challenges enveloping the Malaysian leadership. Challenging research that depicts weak states getting overwhelmed by China’s financial might, this paper shows that Chinese investment can be mobilized to reinforce state power. Indeed, the political elites in a relatively small and weak state such as Malaysia are fairly adept in engaging with Chinese investment to advance key projects. However, Chinese investment has also preserved the careers of some of the Malaysian elites, extending the political control of Asia’s longest ruling coalition.

No longer just a by-product of large-scale infrastructure projects, resettlement has come to be seen as an opportunity for development. China has been central to this process: it uses resettlement as a tool for poverty alleviation, urbanisation, environmental management, and now climate change adaptation, and it does so on a very large scale (in the next four years China plans to resettle 10 million people for poverty alleviation purposes, and up to 100 million to accelerate urbanisation). And yet there exists no coherent conceptual framework with which to analyse resettlement as a phenomenon. In this paper I draw on existing (but fragmented) work on the material, discursive and spatial implications of resettlement to pull together a new framework that could drive forward our understanding of the resettlement apparatus or ‘machine’. Such a framework includes an examination of the actors involved, enabling discourses and process of subjectification, the more or less mundane practices of resettlement, its instrument effects, and the interrelations between these.

Despite its centrality to contemporary urbanism, informality remains peripheral to debates in development studies. Urban informalities are defined as development practices occurring outside legal structures and processes (McFarlane, 2012). However, informalities are also associated with autonomy and creativity, survival practices of the poor, and resistance against authority and elite norms. Despite this, informal practices are considered illegal and thereby perceived as a development problem (Porter, 2011). This ‘fixed’ assumption has engendered social and spatial injustices in cities, including forced evictions of informal settlements.

This paper draws on qualitative and quantitative data collected during PhD field work in Cambodia. The paper explains how and in what ways collective ‘informal’ financial practices of urban poor communities, transgress formal/informal borders informing conventional urban development practice in the global south. Based on the empirical findings, the paper reflects on epistemological and ontological questions about the juxtaposing of binary oppositions defining legal and illegal borders in urban development practice. The paper opens up the transformative potential of thinking the city and its borders as social, temporal and spatial dynamic practices rather than territorially fixed, as well as recognizing informality’s central role in development practice and theoretical debates.

The number of people moving into Fiji’s squatter settlements has been considerably great and increasing rapidly. In 2007, Fiji noted 12.5% of its population residing in approximately 200 squatter settlements around the country. In accordance to the Sustainable Development Goal 11, the Government of Fiji is working towards improving the living conditions of squatter residents. The means of the improvement vary, including provisioning for basic services, formalizing, upgrading facilities, and relocating settlements. In late 2015, the Fiji government planned to formalize 50 squatter settlements, provisioning for 99 years tenancy to residents, with an estimated $8 million budgeted towards squatter upgrading. Congruently, a Non-government Organization Peoples’ Community Network has been assisting the residents of Jittu Estate settlement by provisioning for housing under the Lagilagi Project. This project investigates the effectiveness of relocation and upgrading plan of squatter settlements in Fiji, addressing how some ongoing upgrading plans have taken place, whether or not the progress of each plan has been effective, whether or not the residents of each settlement have benefitted from the plan and how consultation to the residents in the process of upgrading plan has been considered.