License to travel

In the world of ‘fast policy transfer’, stylized models of ‘successful’ paradigmatic cities have been assembled and circulated widely around the world, providing supposedly ‘best practices’ and ‘tried and tested’ policy solutions for a variety of problems. Far from being neutral and objective, these traveling models and policy assemblages are deeply embedded in power relations and animated by urban imaginaries of ‘good places’ to live and work. Both in rhetoric and form, the purported ‘Singapore model’, driven by the entrepreneurial zeal of state agencies as well as private developers, has been exported to many cities in the global south. Yet how does this self-stylized Singapore model possess the representational power and ‘license to travel’? What role does urban materiality play in the circulation and flow of the Singapore model? To this end, this paper argues that the Singapore model rests on the seductive narratives of a self-orientalized ‘Asian success story’ that is enacted and materialized through an assemblage of policy artifacts. On the whole, however, rather than converging towards a unified singular policy narrative, the Singapore model is consumed in highly differentiated and uneven ways, thus underscoring the contradictions and friction that underpin the process through which mobile policies and neoliberal urban models are assembled and circulated around the world. Beyond the empirically grounded analysis of assemblage theory and policy mobility, this paper attends to the diverse urbanisms that are being assembled and produced both within and beyond the global south.