A historical perspective
A city at the bottom of the Malay Peninsula that did not exist, in any meaningful sense, two hundred years ago.
Raffles arrived in 1819 to a fishing village of perhaps a thousand souls and a tiger problem. He saw a harbor, and understood something the rest of the world would take another century to verify.
Today that harbor moves more cargo than almost anywhere on earth. The fishing village has been replaced by a city of six million people who speak four languages, eat eight cuisines for breakfast, and live in flats they own in a country smaller than greater London.
Singapore today – in a nutshell
What stays with you about Singapore is not the spectacle of it — though the spectacle is considerable — but the quietly staggering fact of it. Sixty years ago this was a poor, uncertain city-state with no natural resources, no fresh water, and no obvious reason to survive. The men who built it are all dead now, and the city they built keeps getting taller, cleaner, and richer in their absence, as if the ambition has become structural, load-bearing, something the buildings themselves have absorbed.
Singapore is the only city I have visited where I felt, consistently, that I was the least organized person present. This is a competitive field. I have been to Tokyo.
The city operates at a frequency that other cities occasionally achieve on their best days – Singapore maintains as a baseline. The MRT runs on schedule – arrives every two minutes. The hawker centers are government-managed, and offer very good quality food for S$4.00 – it is extraordinary! The streets are clean with a consistency that suggests either tremendous civic pride or a fine structure that nobody has tested me on yet. And … The street signs are legible and in four languages.
A new car costs approximately S$120,000. This is not a typo. The government decided decades ago that car ownership was a luxury the road network could not absorb, introduced a certificate-of-entitlement auction system, and priced private car ownership at roughly the cost of a London flat. The buses run every four minutes. The connection is not subtle.
You can be fined for chewing gum in certain circumstances, jaywalking with some consistency, and littering with great certainty. In exchange, the city is immaculate, functional, and possessed of a hawker center system so good that UNESCO added it to the Intangible Cultural Heritage list in 2020.
The deal Singapore has made with itself is: we will take your gum and your jaywalking and in return we will give you chicken rice for four dollars and a train that goes everywhere. Most people having tried the chicken rice, though not this one, consider this fair.
The Singapore Sling at Raffles Long Bar costs thirty-seven dollars, is bright pink, and comes with a bowl of monkey nuts you are expected to throw on the floor. The floor is deep in husks from a hundred years of tourists making the same transaction. I threw mine on the floor. I have no regrets. Some rituals are priced correctly.
The unnerving fact
You come home from Singapore and the pothole on your street seems like a decision. The cancelled or delayed train seems like a decision. The fourteen-dollar airport sandwich that tastes of neither love nor effort seems like a decision. Because you have seen, recently and at close range, what it looks like when a city decides differently. And having seen it, you cannot entirely unsee it.
This is Singapore’s most lasting effect on the traveller. Not the skyline, not the food, not the gardens. It’s that they have raised the bar. The inconvenient truth, why does my town, my city, my country not operate for the greater good (?). Why indeed?
Kudos to Singapore, for deciding how the city runs – every piece of it! Someone decided that the trains would run on time and the streets would be clean and the food would be extraordinary and the poor would be housed and the harbor would be open to everyone. And then they did it. In sixty years. From a fishing village.
The tiger is long gone. The ambition, clearly, is not.
Leave a Reply