Mobile cities, modelling policies: Importing/exporting the Singapore model of urban development
Abstract
We live in what has been termed the ‘urban century’, and yet ‘the urban’ – as a physical form; as an assemblage of policies, ideas and networks; and as a category of analysis and understanding – has reached an inflection point in both theory and praxis. Cities are not what they once were, or what they were once thought to be. The integration of the global economy has helped to transform the nature and understanding of urban forms, and has challenged the intellectual underpinnings of urban studies. Such transformations have severely disrupted the discipline, and have cast a question mark over what the future may hold for urban studies, and the scholars and places embroiled therein. In debating the ‘new epistemology of the urban’ (Brenner and Schmid 2015; see also Walker 2015), scholarship is coming to terms with the ‘growing sense of disarticulation, dissipation and fragmentation’ (Peck 2015: 162) within which the discipline is embroiled. Simply put, the urban has become such a complex and variegated topic of analysis that the concept of the ‘urban’ has begun to suffer from ‘diminishing explanatory returns’ (ibid.), and increasingly runs the risk of becoming neutered by theoretical impasse.