Veins of concrete, cities of flow: Reasserting the centrality of circulation in Foucault’s analytics of government

The ‘governmentality’ lectures that Michel Foucault gave at the Collège de France considered the question of urban circulation and how its fluxes and flows have been problematised in different historico-political contexts. To establish the critical parameters of this question, Foucault’s understanding of the ‘urban problem’ will first be addressed and how this relates to governmentality. Subsequently, his analytics of government will be outlined in respect to the wider literature on urban circulation and applied to the flow of water in Singapore, examining how water has shifted from being primarily a locus of sovereignty, discipline and more recently, security. It will be argued that the urban problem and the concomitant question of circulation have been disassociated from more general renderings of governmentality.