Rethinking graduated citizenship: Contemporary public housing in Singapore Shaun S.K. Teo National University of Singapore, Department of Geography, 1 Arts Link, Singapore 117570 article info Article history: Received 3 December 2014 Received in revised form 8 August 2015 Accepted 13 August 2015 Available online 25 August 2015 Keywords: Aspirations Citizenship Developmental State Global city Public housing Singapore abstract The ways in which citizenship and housing are implicated in states’ global city aspirations demonstrate significant path dependency and local contingency. This paper serves to broaden the literature that has been dominated by the Western neoliberal context. First, I argue that The Pinnacle@Duxton – a one-of-a-kind public housing project in Singapore – represents the developmental state’s attempt to graduate its homogeneous public housing landscape, providing for and subsidizing the aspirations of a segment of its increasingly affluent middle class to buy into the ideology of the global city. Second, I show how the graduation of public housing coupled with the exaggerated demand for such exclusive projects validates consumer preference pricing in contemporary public housing. This results in a geographical graduation of citizenship, where the bulk of the population is relegated to lesser options on the edges on the island, unable to fulfil their aspirations for global living. In so doing, I make two contributions to extant literature on housing and citizenship in the global city. One, graduating citizenship is not always a case of states realigning their relationship with their citizens to fit the terms of the market. Two, the denial of citizenship to the global city does not always manifest in terms of substantive rights. Appreciating the unique histories and ideologies underpinning housing policies in global cities is instru- mental if the variegated meanings of global cities and the citizenships within are to be elucidated. Ó 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction In 2009, The Pinnacle@Duxton, the world’s tallest and most expensive public housing project was completed, occupying a dis- tinctive space within the city centre of Singapore. This unprece- dented achievement in the nation-state’s public housing history – according to the government – marks its continued progress as a global city housing equally aspirational and successful global cit- izens. Such a change in the urban fabric of Singapore is emblematic of a wider trend of respatialization and resocialization of housing in cities that accompany states’ global city aspirations. This geo- graphical phenomenon can be analyzed through what Ong (2006a) terms graduated citizenship, where differentiated zones of governance are established within the city to administer the population in accordance to their relevance to global capital. The state calls upon its residents to become global citizens – individu- als who are financially able to live up to the demands of the market-led regeneration of the global city and disciplines those who are not. This idea of financial responsibility, often explicit in the construction of homeownership and global city discourse and policy underscores the will to make citizens more productive through consumption (Flint, 2003; Rogers and Bailey, 2013). Citi- zens are expected to purchase their right to the global city through private homeownership, while those unable to and therefore reli- ant on state housing are conceptualized as ‘flawed’ (Bauman, 2004), legitimizing revanchist intervention against them (Aalbers, 2011). For example, Rogers and Darcy (2014) show how the Sydney government invites private developers to construct ‘‘Global Syd- ney”, a spectacular variety of residences situated in a specific geo- graphical segment of the metropolitan area. Simultaneously, public housing in Sydney has been reconfigured so that only the neediest are given access. In other contexts, such as the UK and US, the reorientation of housing policy has proceeded along similar lines, where citizen rights to the newly imagined global cities are under- pinned by private homeownership. Extant analyses on the global city, citizenship and housing have been largely framed in the Western neoliberal context and do not lend well to other contexts (an exception is Sassen’s (1991) analy- sis on Tokyo). For instance, Ong (2006b) notes that ethics of citizen productivity in democratic, socialist and authoritarian Asian set- tings are not linked to the valorization of the market per se, but to social obligations to build the nation and legitimize the state. For example, in the developmental state of Singapore, the global http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2015.08.003 0016-7185/Ó 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. E-mail address: shaun.teo@nus.edu.sg Geoforum 65 (2015) 222–231 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Geoforum journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/geoforum