https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1504-3404
![Sample our Geography journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5937/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Geography.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
Post-industrial global urbanization has seen the rise of territorial economic development strategies predicated on reconfiguring the urban landscape to conform to novel forms of economic production, often under the guise of “global city” development. This paper reorients the conversation on global city development by highlighting the intermediary roles that particular cities play in brokering flows of global knowledge, goods, and capital through novel spatial-economic configurations. We identify a sub-set of city-states characterized by territorial economic development strategies that are exemplary of “relational” processes. Luxembourg and Singapore serve as illustrative cases in which urban territorial development is guided almost entirely by an exogenous orientation benefitting from an intermediary positionality. Although all cities are in some way “relational” in their politico-economic orientation, these extraordinary cases highlight a number of novel concurrent socio-spatial processes which enabled them to capture key advantages conferred by their positionality in relation to regional and global flows.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1. In this paper, we refer to Luxembourg as a city-state configuration, in many ways comparable to that of Singapore. While Luxembourg, as a country, consists of 102 municipalities, the capital city agglomeration remains the core urban agglomeration in which key economic policies and strategies are made, and where key governing institutions, corporate headquarters and financial institutions are concentrated. Luxembourg city, therefore, drives and shapes the economic fortunes of the other municipalities of the state (see Hesse & Wong, Citation2020).
2. UCITs provides a single regulatory regime across the European Union for open-ended funds investing in transferable securities such as shares and bonds. The AIFM Directive is an EU law on the financial regulation of hedge funds, private equity, real estate funds, and other “Alternative Investment Fund Managers” in the European Union.
3. Authors’ own calculation based on data on foreign workforce numbers from the Ministry of Manpower from 2014 to 2019 (https://www.mom.gov.sg/documents-and-publications/foreign-workforce-numbers) and data from the Comprehensive Labor Force Survey, Manpower Research and Statistics Department, MOM, 2009-2019 (http://stats.mom.gov.sg/Pages/Labor-Force-Summary-Table.aspx).