Deciphering the ‘cosmopolitan grid’: The production of space in diversifying heartland neighbourhoods of Singapore

Abstract

Global capital and highly-skilled international labour are sought by cities for economic growth. Much research has been about Western cities, but less is known about how pro-growth developmental Asian countries, which have become key global hubs, organise their urban planning and policy efforts to gain global capital and skilled labour in their cities. In Singapore, the state is active in reshaping the city into a ‘cosmopolitan grid’ by planning and developing new urban amenity spaces that can attract human capital to fuel the desired urban growth, such as international schools, private housing options, and access to a global selection of goods and services. Oftentimes, the socio-cultural and socio-spatial changes at the neighbourhood level are seemingly ignored, despite the significance of the neighbourhood as a critical social space for the daily practice and formation of social relations in demographically diverse cities. Drawing on cognitive mapping interviews with foreign-born and native-born residents in two upper-middle income suburban neighbourhoods in Singapore, which are recognised as the heartlands of the native-born but have become popular with highly-skilled foreign-born families (namely Western expatriates) in the last decade, this article shows how the top-down rational production of cosmopolitan space by the state framed in a formation of the ‘cosmopolitan grid’ has played out and shaped the everyday production of social space among the native and foreign-born residents which determines the experience and opportunities for integration in this city-state.