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Abstract
This article follows the case of one city—Singapore—that has deliberately fashioned itself as a regional, indeed global, hub for the information age. The city-state conceived of the island's development through a vocabulary of networks and hubs in a space of global flows.
The Singapore government's efforts to embrace the new possibilities of being a global hub while coping with the ramifications of changing social and spatial relationships, at scales from the local to the global will be followed. The article focuses upon the initiative to create a so-called Intelligent Island and the SingaporeONE project to create a pervasive networked environment. These two linked initiatives were aimed at allowing Singaporeans to exploit digital technology, but, they also reconfigured the relationship of Singapore to the outside world.
The material and discursive consequences of these plans will be examined suggesting that the rhetorical and discursive effects are probably as significant as many of the alleged benefits attained through information processing. These initiatives are set in the context of a range of other flows of people and things to raise issues about the city state as a purposive actor shaping the environment and, at the same time, being pushed by forces that destabilise the links between of people and place upon which the state has relied.