City as a Political Idea. UNIV PLYMOUTH

city of art and culture – should be well understood. It was not the museum, or other investments in iconic architecture, that changed the status of the city. It is Gehry’s uniqueness and exotic appeal – as well as that of the ETA – that is being manipulated and sold. New museums in London will not change the way that this city is perceived by the world. Even the most spectacular architectural investments in Sheffield, Plymouth and Cardiff will not become drivers of change unless they are part of a strategy of uniqueness.

      Let us return to the issue of immigrants. For each individual, the place where they have lived for a long time becomes unique. It becomes a place of remembrance, stories and fantasies. These migrants are not only an obvious source of capital, but also the best advocates of their cities in the world and – perhaps above all – potentially the best strategy for developing the uniqueness of their ‘past cities’. If the economic power of a contemporary city – a city in the global network economy – lies in its ability to focus in one place and time many threads, connections and flows, one of which lies at the level of personal relations and sentiments, then is it not the most important clue as to how we should proceed? Especially if it is true that ‘the City exists mainly in the imagination’. The weakness of the City, the weakness of the urban community, comes from the same source as its strength – the flows. Flows that rinse capital and people out of the City. Flows that do not give roots.

      Globalisation presents the peripheral and semi-peripheral countries with an evil alternative which has been repeatedly highlighted by Jadwiga Staniszkis; worse than being exploited, for the cities of these countries, is to remain non-exploited – left outside the global market. The same remark also applies to cities that either become part of the global streams, with all their consequences, or are excluded from them. But is this really the only alternative that exists?

City Management

      Managerial Governance against ‘the Local Community’

      Managing a city is naturally an extremely complex task – after all, the city itself is a strange, heterogeneous creation that escapes definition. However, each management is based on a methodology, and above all has certain initial assumptions, which are defined by priorities and objectives. Therefore, we can talk about certain models of cities: models of city management and urban space. Suppose that there are only two models; one of which details the management of experts, based on professional, ‘rationalised’ knowledge – management to a certain extent authoritarian, which treats the city as a kind of enterprise – and the second based on a bottom-up mechanism of ‘folk’ and strictly democratic-communal management. With the latter I mean ‘the local community’, because the strong social ties that constitute a community may only be found in neighbouring units. The problem in describing a city that is managed ‘communally’ lies in the fact that we still do not deal with an urban community, but only with a set of local communities.

      Divisions between managerial and ‘communal’ governance run across the distinctions to which we were accustomed until recently. ‘Expert’ governance – or better, management – was dominant in both the U.S. and the Soviet bloc countries. Today, the two poles – the two model cities to be considered, reflecting contemporary methods of urban space management – lie entirely outside the existing central areas of the world: they are Singapore in Asia and Porto Alegre in South America (similarly managerial is the governance of Dubai, but there we are dealing primarily with an authoritarian – however enlightened – ruler, therefore Singapore seems to be a better, more interesting example). Singapore, the City-State, in a sense resembles the Italian cities of the Renaissance period or the ancient Greek Polis (but is, however, more like Sparta than any other ancient Greek polis – Sparta was a xenophobic city, while others were surprisingly cosmopolitan).27 Porto Alegre in turn is also a case irresistibly associated with the Greek model of the city. Porto Alegre, however, with its ‘participatory budget’ is far closer to Athens and a democratic, egalitarian community. These two cities – two models and two ideas – may reflect the two poles of thinking about city management.

      Of course, in addition to these models there is a huge spectrum of different intermediate models, where expert management mixes with social participation. Even in these two cities – which are extremes – there are traces of footprints that lead elsewhere. But if we take these two cities as the ‘purest’ examples of two (contradictory?) ideologies, then we can ask whether or not they really are so different from each other. After all, both refer in a direct way to the Greek origins of cities as political communities. So maybe these cities are two sides of the same coin? Singapore is officially a parliamentary republic. In fact, despite the existence of a formal opposition, the People’s Action Party has ruled the country quite a lot since the creation of local government in 1959.

      With less than five million inhabitants, and stable economic growth (despite the famous ‘Asian crisis’ in 1997), Singapore has one of the highest standards of living in Asia. In other words – it is a paradise on Earth. What is so unusual about this City-State is its clear determination to survive and to succeed. Managerial governance of this creature began immediately after it become independent in 1961, and in a manner rather typical of companies (or clubs) the Dutch economist Dr Albert Winsemius was recruited to work as economic advisor in Singapore, remaining there until his retirement in 1984. He is greatly responsible for its effective – as it turned out – strategy for development. The ruling party in the City-State was considered the beginning of a Socialist party but has always been characterised by pragmatism – it combined support for big state construction programs with incentives for foreign investors. Singapore has never been a minimal state. It has been – and still is – known for actively interfering in economic processes, in terms of supporting and placing particular businesses, but these actions have always based on the pursuit of the City’s material success as a whole. And it seems that this success has been achieved: not only is Singapore the 22nd richest country in the world but it also has the highest standard of living in Asia (according to the The Economist). This pragmatic development of the city is probably a result of its geographical location – lying on an island, Singapore has been forced into a rational management of its space and resources. Also, a denser population seems to be preferred – Singapore is developing an Asian version of the compact city. Such cities are characterised by the low cost, high-intensity development of technical infrastructures and amenities such as electricity, gas and water (where the low cost is in part due to low transport costs). Singapore’s inhabitants have everything ‘close’, but to me the most important thing is the vision that has guided its government – and certainly the people – since the inception of the City-State. If the state exists primarily in the imagination, then the people of Singapore must share the same vision and they must believe in it very strongly. In Singapore, social inequalities – as in other cities managing a neoliberal regime – are rising, but the city is maintained by a conscious policy of immigration, resulting in a population shift towards highly skilled professionals, with a very small increase of the so-called ‘underclass’. Thus, despite the widening gap between the richest citizens and the poorest residents of Singapore, the population of this first group is growing faster than the other.28