Pathways to global city formation: a view from the developmental city-state of Singapore

The main aim of this paper is to offer a constructive critique of the dominant (indeed hegemonic) global city/world city discourse. This is a discourse that is overly dependent upon a theoretically globalist perspective derived out of limited empirical studies. Moreover, this is a discourse that focuses relatively too much upon (a) the characteristics of global/world cities and (b) the processes creating global/world cities versus (b) and (c) governance issues and implications. Consequently there remain many unanswered questions about how global cities have ‘come into being’, and what is the role of the state in intentionally devising pathways to global city formation. In such a conceptual context, we tease out the main contours of three forms of global cities – hyper global cities; emerging global cities; and global city-states – in emphasizing the need to consider differential and dynamic developmental pathways. Drawing upon the case of Singapore, we then analyse the unique nature of the global city-state, especially in a Pacific Asian context associated with strategic ‘plan rational’ developmental states. The conjunction of a Pacific Asian city-state with developmentalist policies and capacities both requires and enables this form of global city to be rapidly and constantly reworked in the aim of embedding the city into an extraterritorial terrain of network relations.