ancient cities

726 Situationist City
bazaar economy with preindustrial and semicapitalistic
forms of economic organization, such as
Chinese loan associations and mobile street markets.
With the accelerated expansion of the firmcentered
sector, bazaar activities decline and the
city is gradually transformed by assuming urban
patterns similar to the Western city.
Other frameworks have emerged in recent
times. In the past two decades, Singapore, with its
explicit globalizing ambition, has been the subject
of much study within the rubric of the globalization
literature, usually cast in the role of the successful
non-Western city unique in the way it has been
engineered by a strong state operating in an illiberal
democracy. The triple designation of Singapore as a
nation-city-state renders it an unparalleled laboratory
for investigating the processes and consequences
of state-driven urbanization wherein the
politics of urban landscape—the interplay
between the state, capital, and the (often radicalized)
citizenry—is framed by ideologies of the
nation. More recent scholarship in the vein of
transnational urbanism is also beginning to explore
the role of migrants and mobile others in reconfiguring
the spaces of, and social relations in, the
globalizing city.
Brenda S. A. Yeoh
See also Asian Cities; Colonial City; Global City;
Housing; Urban Planning
Further Readings
Chang, T. C. 2000. “Renaissance Revisited: Singapore as
a ‘Global City for the Arts.’” International Journal of
Urban and Regional Research 24:818–31.
Chua, Beng Huat. 1991. “Not Depoliticized but
Ideologically Successful: The Public Housing Program
in Singapore.” International Journal of Urban and
Regional Research 15(1):24–41.
Kong, Lily and Brenda S. A. Yeoh. 2003. The Politics of
Landscapes in Singapore: Constructions of “Nation.”
Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press.
McGee, Terence G. 1967. The Southeast Asian City: A
Social Geography of Primate Cities in Southeast Asia.
London: G. Bell.
Yeoh, Brenda S. A. 1996. Contesting Space: Power
Relations and the Urban Built Environment in
Colonial Singapore. Oxford, UK: Oxford University
Press.
Si t u a t i o n i S t ci t y
Situationist city is a term referring to radical
engagements with urban questions by members of
the Situationist International (SI) and their associates
during the 1950s and 1960s. As a group of
artists, activists, and writers based mainly in
Western Europe and seeking to revolutionize contemporary
societies, the situationists had a long
and multifarious concern with cities. They opposed
processes of capitalist urbanization and planning
at the time, attacking the ways in which cities
were being destroyed and remade within what
they called “the society of the spectacle.” Drawing
on and developing Marxist understandings of
urban space and everyday life, and also engaging
with the legacies of avant-gardes from earlier in
the twentieth century, especially Dada and surrealism,
they depicted cities as sites of alienation,
control, and segregation through which prevailing
capitalist sociospatial relations of domination are
produced and reproduced. At the same time, however,
they explored cities as sites of potential freedom,
believing they could become realms of
emancipation and human fulfillment.
Situationist city was not a term employed by the
SI and derives instead from writings and exhibitions
on the group that have proliferated since the
1990s, as it has been rediscovered within academia
and mainstream culture and positioned within histories
of the avant-garde as well as Western
Marxism. Such references may imply a singular
theory or doctrine based on design or planning,
but this is misleading because the ideas and practices
of the SI were evolving, diverse, and contested,
developed in varied ways by the group’s 70
members during its formal existence between 1957
and 1972 as well as by a number of forerunners.
They also far exceeded any specialist discipline and
stemmed, above all, from the desire to change
everyday urban life and space. A crucial insight that
the SI shared with Henri Lefebvre and with many
radical geographers since Lefebvre is that, to
change everyday life, it is necessary to change
everyday space and vice versa. Their critical concern
with cities therefore came out of this appreciation
of the social and political significance of
space as they addressed how to envisage and construct
urban spaces as part of a strategy for social