Aspirational City

Abstract

Since its dramatic metamorphosis from British colonial port to gleaming ‘world class city’, Singapore has become an object of imitative desire for cities around the world, and has even begun exporting its urban planning techniques to countries such as China, Brazil, the UAE and Rwanda. This essay considers some of the implications of Singapore's ascendance to position of aspirational city for the Global South. I begin by reflecting on the distinct spatial technologies the Singaporean state has utilized to elevate itself to a model, neoliberalizing global city. As disruptions of the mimetic desire for Singapore, I analyse several films by Singaporean documentary filmmaker Tan Pin Pin: 9th August (2006), Singapore Gaga (2005) and 80kmh (2004). The films reveal disregarded and ephemeral perspectives of the city, deconstructing the spatial imaginaries that underpin triumphant narratives of Singapore's rise. Tan's films index heterogeneous desires for differential spaces – communal, rural and transnational – and other linkages beyond the touted ‘network infrastructure’ of the global city. This essay thus complicates those imaginaries of Singapore as a city that has leap-frogged over its conditions of postcoloniality to become the exemplary aspirational city of twenty-first-century global capitalism.