Industrial Restructuring and the Development of Office Spaces in Singapore

Abstract

An important shift has occurred since the 1970s and this is a move from an international to a global economy. In this transition, capital has to make effective use of geographical and institutional differences in the world. This process is reshaping the inter-national system into global networks controlled from a handful of global cities in the core countries. However, studies on global (world) cities in the context of the new inter-national division of labor and industrial location have been concerned about the hierarchical position of cities in a static sense. That is the differences are viewed under fixed conditions, concentrating on global cities in core areas, and not the semi-periphery.Because of the emergence of new regions which have comparative advantages of periphery over the semi-periphery, these seems to be an acceleration of inter-urban competition and alliance across borders. For survival in a global economy, cities which are located the semi-periphery have to make up for geographical and institutional differences with self-regulation, ensaring that global capital can be made to work more effectively through the inter-national division of labor and financial systems.This paper, attempts to grasp how a semi-peripheral global city secures its position in global economic interactions by acquiring the particular economic activities which can disperse from the core or innovating it, the author attempted to consider the industrial restructuring and the office development in Singapore, directing particular attention to the role of the state. The following summarizes the main results:There appeared to be growth of office workers within all industrial sectors, but especially the FIRE and business services, and a concurrent decline of production workers in the manufacturing sector since the 1980s. The reason for these trends may be explained by both external and internal factors.The external factors are the globalization of production and finance systems. The establishment of regional headquarters in Asia can be accounted for the necessity of obtaining‘the foothold space’in the emerging market: a result of United States, European, Japanese, and NIEs trans-national corporations, especially in the electronic industry, expansion of off-shore production, as well as the globalization of the financial system brought about by advanced telecommunication and information technology and ever increasing international money flows.The internal factors are the economic strategies that have been implemented by the Economic Development Board (EDB), a statutory board to assist survival of the city-state in a global economy. As the EDB encouraged the removal of the labor intensive manufacturing sector from Singapore and its relocation to neighboring regions since the 1980s, the above external conditions served Singapore by offering a favorable business environment for office activities. The articulation of the external and internal factors regulated by the state led to growth in the number of office workers.In Singapore, much office space was constructed in the CBD. At the beginning, comparatively small office buildings were developed in the Cecil district which is adjacent the traditional hard-core of the CBD. Following this construction, large and smart buildings which incorporate advanced information and telecommunication technology were built in the hard-core. As for the use of this office space, there is now a spatial agglomeration of the financial industry in the hard-core concurrent with the globalization of finance. That is to say the developmental process of office space in Singapore, advanced toward the hard-core from the adjacent district and facilitated the shaping traditional financial industrial district into the global one. This process is in the opposite direction of global cities built historically in the core.