Global City Futures offers a queer analysis of urban and national development in Singapore, the Southeast Asian city-state commonly cast as a leading “global city.” Much discourse on Singapore focuses on its extraordinary socioeconomic development and on the fact that many city and national governors around the world see it as a developmental model. But counternarratives complicate this success story, pointing out rising income inequalities, the lack of a social safety net, an unjust migrant labor regime, significant restrictions on civil liberties, and more.

With Global City Futures Natalie Oswin contributes to such critical perspectives by centering recent debates over the place of homosexuality in the city-state. She extends out from these debates to consider the ways in which the race, class, and gender biases that are already well critiqued in the literature on Singapore (and on other cities around the world) are tied in key ways to efforts to make the city-state into not just a heterosexual space that excludes “queer” subjects but a heteronormative one that “queers” many more than LGBT people. Oswin thus argues for the importance of taking the politics of sexuality and intimacy much more seriously within both Singapore studies and the wider field of urban studies.

“This is an exciting and original take on the politics of a global city, one which effortlessly combines queer and post-colonial theories to show how the intimate politics of heternormativity are central to the making of the Singaporean city-state. As well as being a vital intervention in the broad field of critical SIngapore studies, it represents a significant step forward in world cities research, and is essential reading for all those interested in the making of cities in the context of contemporary globalization."

"Global City Futures is a timely reminder that what appear to be contemporary 'LGBT issues' in fact belong in a broader historical context of colonial and postcolonial anxieties and strategies of governance. Embedded in scholarly and ethical commitments of queer studies, Oswin urges us to see that in our times of flux and transition, troubled by multiple inequalities and injustices, scholars and activists would do well to look up from our silos of causes to recognize intersectionalities and articulate connections. To move forward, we must regularly glance back; and to imagine alternatives, we must confront shared circumstances of erasure, abjection, precarity. "

NATALIE OSWIN is an associate professor of geography at McGill University.