Creative cities as a spatial organization form of the new capitalism: The case of Singapore

This study discusses the urban spatial reflections of the transformations taken place in the socio-economic structure at the late of the twentieth century. Because of new capitalist relations such as high technology and knowledge-based economy, international capital and finance flows, transfer of North industries to Southern countries, the major cities of the world have become the headquarters of global management, governance, finance and banking. Besides these processes called as world city or global cities, the relevance of the new capitalism with the creative cities through cultural-creative sectors has influenced the formations of urban organizations. The new global economy shaped by the concepts of creativity and innovation re-designs urban spaces to make creative milieu and processes in cities around the world. Urban spaces are regarded as spaces where creative ideas may grow up and can be exchanged. Thus, the contemporary inclinations aim to build attractive centers and social milieu by including cultural and aesthetic values into cities, rather than building just hard infrastructures. The creative city discourses presently focus on making cities multi-agent, multi-dimensional and interdisciplinary and on bringing the soft infrastructure of societies out in landscapes. In this context, recently developing South Asian cases like Singapore city-state are worth analyzing. In this study are figured out the relations of new capitalism with urban spaces through creative city-making processes based on the Singapore city-state.