Increasingly cities in the South are disrupting con­temporary imaginations of modernity rooted in the global North by creating futuristic, hypermodern spaces and built form. Dubai has become (in)famous for materialising real estate fantasies and creating impossible landscapes of land on water and snow­scapes in a desert. Rio, Beijing and Cape Town have won bids to host the World Cup and the Olympics and followed through with a rewrite of their urban landscapes to match and exceed expectations of spectacle associated with these events. These cities are competitively, even chauvinis­tically, jumping forward on the development trajec­tory. The commentary from the North remains skeptical and eager to expose deficiencies in the South’s new facade (particularly evident during the Beijing Olympics), while claims and projects in the South are ready to be post-history and write their legacy in terms of the future, rather than the past. These claims and counter-claims highlight the spatial/social dichotomies inscribed within competitive practices of hypermodernity and the reemergence of place and place-making in contem­porary globalisation research. This chapter analyses place-making efforts underlying production of hyper­modern spaces in the global South and highlights that these spaces reveal public and private negotia­tions to anchor transnational flows of capital, and institutional preference given to elite desires at the cost of social displacements, urban fragmentation and increasing inequality.