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AbstractThis article aims to understand contemporary forms of "digital work" and how this is imagined in visionary documents in the context of smart urbanism. Specifically, we argue for an infrastructural perspective on smart urbanism to highlight (1) how such visionary documents organize society in specific ways and (2) how this organization is rooted in work that is imagined as being mainly informational and disembodied. Through an analysis of Singapore's recent Smart Nation initiative, we make a case for the inclusion of the actual human and embodied work that constitutes visions of smart urbanism. This work comprises both the physical construction and maintenance of digital infrastructure and the monitoring of these infrastructures and the interpretation of data on which they run. Finally, we show how an infrastructural inversion of smart urban initiatives is capable of highlighting these invisibilities of human work, specifically by drawing on the mundanity, temporality, and materiality of work that is considered digital.

Since the turn of the millennium, Singapore has made significant investments in its biomedical research sector, with in recent years an increasing emphasis on efforts to 'translate' the fruits of research into clinical applications. In this paper, we investigate how translational research trajectories are built in present-day Singapore, through a case study pertaining to the use of retinal photography for disease screening. The circulation of such images in the context of a tele-ophthalmology pilot service designed to support the early detection of eye disease related to diabetes, helps attune research to clinical practice and vice versa, in ways that open possibilities for future medical innovation. Our case study points to an inversion of the typical characterization of translational research as a process that begins at the 'bench' and then moves downstream (to the 'bed') in a linear fashion. It also illuminates certain distinctive features of the current biomedical innovation landscape in the city-state that may provide insights for other countries embarking on medical research.