Cities for nations? Examining the city-nation-state relation in information age Malaysia

Accounts of new forms of society and economy supported by advances in information and communications technology have both identified and fostered a belief in the growing importance of cities and urban-regions. Cities, indeed, would appear to be replacing nation-states as the dominant unit of economic organization and social identification. Yet conceptualizations in the existing literature are derived from a small number of supposedly paradigmatic urban cases. This article argues that urban and regional studies should be attentive to a diversity which is perhaps lost in the universalizing epochal phrase 'Information Age'. The on-going development of the Multimedia Super Corridor (MSC), a high-tech urban expansion of the Malaysian national capital, Kuala Lumpur, is used as a case study to (re)examine city-nation-state relations. Rather than presuming a substitution of 'cities for nations', the article identifies dimensions of reworked mutuality between the MSC city-region and the Malaysian nation-state. MSC urban development is shown to be: (1) an expression of re-scaled central (federal) state power; (2) a 'national node' for plugging Malaysia into the global information society; and (3) an exemplary space of high-tech Malaysian nationalism. These traits may have resonances elsewhere. However, the intention here is not to posit a set of generalized new city-nation-state mutualities, but rather to highlight the importance of exploration through specific urban-national cases.