Qualitative methods : touchy, feely, look-see?

Abstract

This paper follows the case of one city that has deliberately fashioned itself as a regional, indeed global, hub for the information age. Singapore has shaped itself into a global hub in what is often seen as a global information space that depends upon key. The state conceived of the island’s development through a vocabulary of networks and hubs in a space of global flows. This paper follows 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 a range of scales from the local to the global. The paper 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 aimed to allow Singaporeans to exploit digital technology but also reconfigured the relationship of Singapore to the outside world. The paper will examine the material and discursive consequences of these plans – suggesting that the rhetorical and discursive effects are probably as significant as many of the alleged benefits 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, on the one hand, a purposive actors shaping the environment and, on the other, being pushed by forces that destabilise the linkage of people and place upon which the state relied.