Singapore

💡 About Singapore

Singapore's transformation from a malaria-ridden colonial backwater with no natural resources, no fresh water and a population mired in poverty in 1965 — when it was expelled from the Malaysian federation and forced to go it alone — to one of the wealthiest, cleanest, safest and most technologically advanced nations on Earth within a single generation is one of the most remarkable stories of governance, urban planning and sheer collective determination in modern history. The vision of founding Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew, who governed Singapore from independence until 1990 with a combination of authoritarianism and pragmatic genius, was to make the city-state so efficient, so clean, so honest and so educated that it would become indispensable to global commerce — a strategy that succeeded beyond any reasonable expectation, producing a per capita GDP today that exceeds that of the United States. Singapore's famous strictness of law — chewing gum is banned from public sale, graffiti carries mandatory caning, drug trafficking is punishable by death, and littering attracts heavy fines — is often mocked in the Western press, but the practical results (an extraordinarily clean city, minimal corruption, very low crime) are envied by city managers worldwide.

Gardens by the Bay, opened in 2012 at a cost of over $1 billion on reclaimed land adjacent to Marina Bay, is one of the most astonishing pieces of landscape architecture ever created: its Supertrees — 18 steel-framed structures between 25 and 50 metres tall, draped in living plants and topped with photovoltaic cells that harvest solar energy — perform a nightly light and sound show that draws thousands of visitors; its two climate-controlled biomes (the Flower Dome and the Cloud Forest) maintain permanent environments of the Mediterranean and tropical highland respectively. Changi Airport has been rated the world's best airport for eight consecutive years in the Skytrax survey, featuring a 40-metre indoor waterfall called the Rain Vortex at its centrepiece, a butterfly garden, a 24-hour cinema showing first-run movies, a rooftop swimming pool, and the extraordinary Jewel retail and entertainment complex; it processes over 65 million passengers annually with a standard of efficiency, cleanliness and service that makes every other airport feel inadequate by comparison. Singapore's hawker centre culture — where open-air or covered food courts serve hundreds of dishes from dozens of ethnic traditions at extraordinary prices, with queues at the best stalls stretching around the block — has been inscribed on UNESCO's Intangible Cultural Heritage list; the Liao Fan Hong Kong Soya Sauce Chicken Rice and Noodle stall in Chinatown became the world's first street food stall to receive a Michelin star.

The city-state is governed as a quasi-autonomous city and nation simultaneously, allowing it to make decisions with the speed and coherence of a corporation rather than the slow democratic deliberation of a larger state — whether building an entirely new town to house overflow population, constructing the world's first Formula 1 street race circuit, or designating a new marina as a luxury real estate precinct, Singapore moves with a decisiveness that larger democracies cannot match. Despite its reputation for sterile efficiency, Singapore has produced extraordinary architecture — the Marina Bay Sands hotel, whose three 55-storey towers are capped by a 340-metre infinity pool hovering above the city, has become the defining image of 21st-century Asian urbanism — and a literary and arts scene that grows more vibrant with every decade.

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