ABSTRACT
The nature of state-society relations and hence the role which civil society contributes to public policy decision-making, can be generally assumed to have a considerable impact not only on the production of urban form but also on spatial changes within the city. Such political logic; however, contends for space in an age of economic globalization in which there has been an increasing concern about the displacement of the political by economic logic and the extension of the lore of the market sphere (Autes 1997; Moulaert and Scott 1997). Certainly examples of competition as well as competitiveness among cities abound in the global network of investment flows, which have been reflected in the so-called mega-urban projects designed to attract the attention of international investors and business firms (Olds 1995; Bunnell 2002). This global competition among cities has not only been paralleled by state intervention at both the national and local levels, but also its participation in real entrepreneurial strategies (Hall and Hubbard 1998). The developmental state that had in the 1980s and 1990s driven the rapid transformation and growth of many Southeast and East Asian economies ( Johnson 2001; Castells 1992) appears to have been translated at the local, that is, urban level into entrepreneurialism driven by the local state. The strongest examples of the developmental state have been those which have succeeded in integrating their economies with the global economy at the fastest rate. These include Singapore and, more recently, Thailand, Malaysia and China.
