Global City Futures offers a queer analysis of urban and national development in Singapore, the Southeast Asian city-state commonly cast as a leading “global city.” Much discourse on Singapore focuses on its extraordinary socioeconomic development and on the fact that many city and national governors around the world see it as a developmental model. But counternarratives complicate this success story, pointing out rising income inequalities, the lack of a social safety net, an unjust migrant labor regime, significant restrictions on civil liberties, and more. With Global City Futures Natalie Oswin contributes to such critical perspectives by centering recent debates over the place of homosexuality in the city-state. She extends out from these debates to consider the ways in which the race, class, and gender biases that are already well critiqued in the literature on Singapore (and on other cities around the world) are tied in key ways to efforts to make the city-state into not just a heterosexual space that excludes “queer” subjects but a heteronormative one that “queers” many more than LGBT people. Oswin thus argues for the importance of taking the politics of sexuality and intimacy much more seriously within both Singapore studies and the wider field of urban studies.

Global City Futures offers a queer analysis of urban and national development in Singapore, the Southeast Asian city-state commonly cast as a leading ?global city.? Much discourse on Singapore focuses on its extraordinary socioeconomic development and on the fact that many city and national governors around the world see it as a developmental model. But counternarratives complicate this success story, pointing out rising income inequalities, the lack of a social safety net, an unjust migrant labor regime, significant restrictions on civil liberties, and more. With Global City Futures Natalie Oswin contributes to such critical perspectives by centering recent debates over the place of homosexuality in the city-state. She extends out from these debates to consider the ways in which the race, class, and gender biases that are already well critiqued in the literature on Singapore (and on other cities around the world) are tied in key ways to efforts to make the city-state into not just a heterosexual space that excludes "queer" subjects but a heteronormative one that "queers" many more than LGBT people. Oswin thus argues for the importance of taking the politics of sexuality and intimacy much more seriously within both Singapore studies and the wider field of urban studies.

This book goes beyond current ways that the impact of climate change upon the city are understood. In doing so it addresses climate in a variety of its connotations. It looks to the nomadic behaviour patterns of the past for lessons for today’s population unsettlement, and argues that as human survival will increasingly be linked directly to movement, the city can no longer be defined as a constrained space. The impacts of climate change must be understood as a combination of the actual and the expected, and have to be addressed both practically and culturally. City Futures in an Age of Changing Climate looks at how cities can adapt and respond to the unsustainable conditions they are now facing. The book considers possible post-urban futures, exposing a range of very different urban forms, and addresses the concept of fragmentation; the breaking up of any coherent economic or cultural nucleic urban spaces. Urban planners, designers, development practitioners, and anyone seeking to understand what the future is likely to look like for our cities, and how to prepare for it, will find this an essential read.

This book provides a detailed analysis of how governance in Singapore has evolved since independence to become what it is today, and what its prospects might be in a post-Lee Kuan Yew future. Firstly, it discusses the question of political leadership, electoral dominance and legislative monopoly in Singapore’s one-party dominant system and the system’s durability. Secondly, it tracks developments in Singapore’s public administration, critically analysing the formation and transformation of meritocracy and pragmatism, two key components of the state ideology. Thirdly, it discusses developments within civil society, focusing in particular on issues related to patriarchy and feminism, hetero-normativity and gay activism, immigration and migrant worker exploitation, and the contest over history and national narratives in academia, the media and the arts. Fourthly, it discusses the PAP government’s efforts to connect with the public, including its national public engagement exercises that can be interpreted as a subtler approach to social and political control. In increasingly complex conditions, the state struggles to maintain its hegemony while securing a pre-eminent position in the global economic order. Tan demonstrates how trends in these four areas converge in ways that signal plausible futures for a post-LKY Singapore.

Alternative Urban Futures challenges existing models of urban development and promotes alternative paradigms, processes, and technologies designed to fulfill human needs and limit the harmful impacts of human activities on the environment. The book focuses on how planners and policy makers can develop and manage essential urban infrastructures in ways that support sustainable development in the areas of waste management, water supply and management, energy production and use, building design and construction, land-use, transportation, and food systems. Each chapter features case studies that provide concrete examples of how ecologically and socially responsible urban and sustainable development planning and policy approaches have been successfully implemented in cities around the world. The book is especially effective in its emphasis on recently published statistics and writing supporting new planning and policy recommendations. Each chapter ends with a summary, accompanied by a list of questions that can be addressed with information provided in the text.

Cities are the future. In the past two decades, a global urban revolution has taken place, mainly in the South. The 'mega-cities' of the developing world are home to over 10 million people each and even smaller cities are experiencing unprecedented population surges. The problems surrounding this influx of people - slums, poverty, unemployment and lack of governance - have been well-documented. This book is a powerful indictment of the current consensus on how to deal with these challenges. Pieterse argues that the current 'shelter for all' and 'urban good governance' policies treat only the symptoms, not the causes of the problem. Instead, he claims, there is an urgent need to reinvigorate civil society in these cities, to encourage radical democracy, economic resilience, social resistance and environmental sustainability folded into the everyday concerns of marginalised people. Providing a dynamic picture of a cosmopolitan urban citizenship, this book is an essential guide to one of the new century's greatest challenges.

How Los Angeles, Hong Kong, and China deal with such urban environmental issues as ports, goods movement, air pollution, water quality, transportation, and public space. Over the past four decades, Los Angeles, Hong Kong, and key urban regions of China have emerged as global cities—in financial, political, cultural, environmental, and demographic terms. In this book, Robert Gottlieb and Simon Ng trace the global emergence of these urban areas and compare their responses to a set of six urban environmental issues. These cities have different patterns of development: Los Angeles has been the quintessential horizontal city, the capital of sprawl; Hong Kong is dense and vertical; China's new megacities in the Pearl River Delta, created by an explosion in industrial development and a vast migration from rural to urban areas, combine the vertical and the horizontal. All three have experienced major environmental changes in a relatively short period of time. Gottlieb and Ng document how each has dealt with challenges posed by ports and the movement of goods, air pollution (Los Angeles, Hong Kong, and urban China are all notorious for their hazardous air quality), water supply (all three places are dependent on massive transfers of water) and water quality, the food system (from seed to table), transportation, and public and private space. Finally they discuss the possibility of change brought about by policy initiatives and social movements.

This volume studies the urbanisation trends of medium-sized cities of India to develop a typology of urban resilience. It looks at historic second-tier cities like Nashik, Bhopal, Kolkata and Agra, which are laboratories of smart experiments and are subject to technological ubiquity, with rampant deployment of smart technologies and dashboard governance. The book examines the traditional values and systems of these cities that have proven to be resilient and studies how they can be adapted to contemporary times. It also highlights the vulnerabilities posed by current urban development models in these cities and presents best practices that could provide leads to address impending climate risks. The book also offers a unique Resilience Index that can drive change in the way cities are imagined and administered, customised to specific needs at various scales of application. Part of the Urban Futures series, the volume is an important contribution to the growing scholarship of southern urbanism and will be of interest to researchers and students of urban studies, urban ecology, urban sociology, architecture, geography, urban design, anthropology, cultural studies, environment, sustainability, urban planning and climate change.

There are now more than three hundred city-regions around the world with populations greater than one million. These city-regions are expanding vigorously, and they present many new and deep challenges to researchers and policy-makers in both the more developed and less developed parts of the world. The processes of global economic integration and accelerated urban growth make traditional planning and policy strategies in these regions increasingly inadequate, while more effective approaches remain largely in various stages of hypothesis and experimentation. 'Global City-Regions' represents a multifaceted effort to deal with the many different issues raised by these developments. It seeks at once to define the question of global city-regions and to describe the internal and external dynamics that shape them; it proposes a theorization of global city-regions based on their economic and political responses to intensifying levels of globalization; and it offers a number of policy insights into the severe social problems that confront global city-regions as they come face to face with an economically and politically neoliberal world. At a moment when globalization is increasingly subject to critical scrutiny in many different quarters, this book provides a timely overview of its effects on urban and regional development, one of its most important (but perhaps least understood) corollaries. The book also offers a series of nuanced visions of alternative possible futures.