Métropoles (Dec 2015)
L’urbanité singapourienne au défi de la globalisation : stratégies, formes et fonctions urbaines en transition
Abstract
Singapore experienced, during the two last decades, a series of urban transformations, resulting from the political choice of rebranding the economy of the City-State following the crisis of the 1990’s and early 2000’s. Such changes in the urban identity of the city, that ranged from a major liberty given to the private sector to develop programmes of high-end housing to the construction of huge resorts and casinos have had a strong impact on the local conception of what urbanity is, in a country where the most common paradigms had been for 50 years that of collective public housing and of a strict, and sometimes intrusive, State supervision of urban virtues. The object of this paper is to analyse such developments, between the threat of a possible dissolution of the local values of urbanity and the capacity of resilience of local society.
