Conclusion

To sum up, Part I of this book explores how social control over the imagination, representation and actual planning of urban space has been stimulated and enforced by real estate advertisements. The primary objective in this process is to unravel the complex symbolic and spatial strategies appropriated and executed by a variety of social agents in order to shape manifold references to the idea of the ‘world-class’ city. The ‘world-class’ city is more than a geographical location. It is what Soja defines as ‘simcity’: ‘the composite product of the restructured urban imaginary’ (2000: 339), a ‘patchwork quilt of specialized residential communities’ (ibid.: 341) based on social segregation, with an extended family of simulated cousins at the so-called Gold Coast in Spain, the outskirts of Moscow or Sao Paulo. It connotes particular cosmopolitan lifestyles, desires and fears of those who aspire to belong to it. The global city is under high pressure to perform in order not to fall behind in the race for the ‘world-class’. Since it must provide aesthetic appeal and professional infrastructure for people and institutions with an interest in the highly mobile service sectors and transnational capital flows or commodity circulation, the city is increasingly following the patterns of a multinational corporation (rather than a state government). In this process, the concept of the colonial city (as well as lifestyle) continues to remain relevant, and the ‘world-class’ city is imagined once again in terms of dichotomies such as ‘order’ and ‘disorder’, ‘civilised’ and ‘uncivilised’. Moreover, it legitimises the categorisation of its population into ‘first-class’ citizens vis-à-vis a ‘mass’ of people who are not considered part of this moral community that contributes to the city's growth and success. This is of course a highly cynical hierarchisation since the ‘masses’ contribute crucially to the functioning of the city (e.g., construction work, domestic work, transport and waste removal). Discussed in particular are the attempts of the new middle classes to become a dominant group and influence power relations, and consequently social spatialisation. The visual rhetoric examined here highlights the desire to attract investment and potential buyers by promising access to ‘belong to the world-class’. It also points to various tensions contested in the discursive field of social spatialisation, for instance, between the ‘clean’ and ‘dirty’, ‘safe’ and ‘threatening’, ‘belonging’ and ‘place-less’, first-class and third-class citizens.