Tim Bunnell

Tim Bunnell

Tim

Bunnell

2015

Department of Geography, National University of Singapore

United Kingdom

Associate Professor

Tim Bunnell is Associate Professor in the Department of Geography at the National University of Singapore. His research focuses on urban development in Southeast Asia and the region’s constitutive connections with other parts of the world. That includes examination of the transformation of urban regions (cities and wider urban territories), the lives and aspirations of people in those territories, and constitutive connections between them. Empirically, he has focused on Southeast Asia (mostly working on cities in Malaysia and Indonesia) and on interurban connections between that region and elsewhere. Beginning with doctoral research carried out in the 1990s, his work on the discursive and material making of megaprojects and high-tech urban space in and around Kuala Lumpur culminated in the publication of Malaysia, Modernity and the Multimedia Super Corridor (Routledge) in 2004. The main focus of his research subsequently shifted to examination of historical linkages between Southeast Asia and the port city of Liverpool through the lives of Malay men who arrived there as seafarers in the middle decades of the twentieth century. The book which emerged from that research, From World City to the World in One City: Liverpool through Malay Lives (Wiley) was published in 2016. Bunnell has a longstanding interest in relations between innovation, broadly conceived, and urban and regional studies – ranging from economic geographies of firm location and networks, to policy and governance ‘good practice’ and to ground-level incremental change associated with individual and community aspirations. He has begun to develop that thread of research into a book project on geographies of the future.