ABSTRACT
Global cities, in prevailing conceptualizations and popular fantasies of a highly interconnected world, are typically characterized by strong infrastructure, sophisticated technological networks, ethnic and cultural diversity, an open political climate, and a cosmopolitan outlook. These characteristics are at once the reason for and the consequence of global cities as strategic and specialized centers of highly mobile finance capital. Enacting, in Saskia Sassen’s (2001) term, a distinct ‘spatiotemporal order’, the global city is embedded in a worldwide grid along with other similar cities causing it frequently to appear at odds with some of the demands of territorial nationalism where sovereignty is dependent on geographical borders and a certain non-contiguity of space. This opposition accounts in part for the impression that the global city operates according to a law and logic different from those governing the rest of the nation in which it is situated and bound; indeed that it is, like the past, perhaps another country altogether. Sassen (2004) refers to this disjunction between global city and nation as part of a material as well as conceptual ‘unbundling’ of the nation-state and its authority over people’s lives. In the case of Singapore – the ‘little red dot’ on the world map that is island, nation, state and city all at once because of its size – the tension between its aspiration to become a global city securely plugged into neoliberal market capitalism (Comaroff and Comaroff 2000) and the demands of social (including racial) control related to its nation-statehood appears in many ways rather more acutely intensified.
