Singapore World City

With stunning photographs and insightful commentary this travel pictorial and Singapore travel guide captures the dynamism of a remarkable Pacific nation. In just a few short decades, Singapore has transformed itself from a tiny island off the coast of mainland Asia into a global superpower in banking, IT, education, biotech, transportation and many other fields. The fascinating story of how this tiny city-state which has no hinterland, no natural resources, and a relatively small population has achieved success is told in this book. Singapore's history as a British colonial port, its dynamic multi-ethnic population, and its innovative governmental and social structures, are a part of the story. But there are others as well. How Singapore became a regional hub for finance, shipping and air travel, and now also for the arts, sport and leisure—are all showcased in dynamic detail, with over 300 full-color photographs to illustrate graphically how this small island functions like a well-tuned racing machine. Author Kim Inglis, a journalist and long-time local resident, leads the reader on a series of explorations through Singapore's most notable districts and neighborhoods, explaining the growth and importance, and showcasing what they have to offer the visitor. Included are many lesser-known corners of the island which very few visitors ever get to see!

Global City Futures offers a queer analysis of urban and national development in Singapore, the Southeast Asian city-state commonly cast as a leading ?global city.? Much discourse on Singapore focuses on its extraordinary socioeconomic development and on the fact that many city and national governors around the world see it as a developmental model. But counternarratives complicate this success story, pointing out rising income inequalities, the lack of a social safety net, an unjust migrant labor regime, significant restrictions on civil liberties, and more. With Global City Futures Natalie Oswin contributes to such critical perspectives by centering recent debates over the place of homosexuality in the city-state. She extends out from these debates to consider the ways in which the race, class, and gender biases that are already well critiqued in the literature on Singapore (and on other cities around the world) are tied in key ways to efforts to make the city-state into not just a heterosexual space that excludes "queer" subjects but a heteronormative one that "queers" many more than LGBT people. Oswin thus argues for the importance of taking the politics of sexuality and intimacy much more seriously within both Singapore studies and the wider field of urban studies.

The Lee Kuan Yew World City Prize is a biennial international award that honours outstanding contributions to the creation of vibrant, liveable and sustainable urban communities around the world. Awarded jointly by the Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA) and the Centre for Liveable Cities, both in Singapore, the 2012 prize went to the City of New York for its remarkable transformation in the decade since the 2001 World Trade Center attack. Cities in Transformation presents the award winners and special mentions for the 2010 and 2012 editions of the award and honours their efforts to create dynamic and sustainable urban communities. The cities featured are New York (2012 laureate) and Bilbao (2010 laureate), as well as special mentions, Ahmedabad, Brisbane, Copenhagen, Malmö, Vancouver, Melbourne, Curitiba (awarded to Jamie Lerner), Delhi (awarded to Sheila Dikshit) and Khayelitsha in Cape Town (awarded to AHT Group AG/SUN Development). Cities in Transformation includes a foreword by Lee Kuan Yew, the venerable Singapore statesman from whom the Prize is named, and insightful and fascinating chapters on each city that feature stunning photography that will give readers unique insights into the cities that are leading the way in inspired urban planning.

This book provides a detailed analysis of how governance in Singapore has evolved since independence to become what it is today, and what its prospects might be in a post-Lee Kuan Yew future. Firstly, it discusses the question of political leadership, electoral dominance and legislative monopoly in Singapore’s one-party dominant system and the system’s durability. Secondly, it tracks developments in Singapore’s public administration, critically analysing the formation and transformation of meritocracy and pragmatism, two key components of the state ideology. Thirdly, it discusses developments within civil society, focusing in particular on issues related to patriarchy and feminism, hetero-normativity and gay activism, immigration and migrant worker exploitation, and the contest over history and national narratives in academia, the media and the arts. Fourthly, it discusses the PAP government’s efforts to connect with the public, including its national public engagement exercises that can be interpreted as a subtler approach to social and political control. In increasingly complex conditions, the state struggles to maintain its hegemony while securing a pre-eminent position in the global economic order. Tan demonstrates how trends in these four areas converge in ways that signal plausible futures for a post-LKY Singapore.

Two hundred years ago, Sir Stamford Raffles established the modern settlement of Singapore with the intent of seeing it become ‘a great commercial emporium and fulcrum’. But by the time independence was achieved in 1965, the city faced daunting problems of housing shortage, slums and high unemployment. Since then, Singapore has become one of the richest countries on earth, providing, in Sir Peter Hall’s words, ‘perhaps the most extraordinary case of economic development in the history of the world’. The story of Singapore’s remarkable achievements in the first half century after its independence is now widely known. In Planning Singapore: The Experimental City, Stephen Hamnett and Belinda Yuen have brought together a set of chapters on Singapore’s planning achievements, aspirations and challenges, which are united in their focus on what might happen next in the planning of the island-state. Chapters range over Singapore’s planning system, innovation and future economy, housing, biodiversity, water and waste, climate change, transport, and the potential transferability of Singapore’s planning knowledge. A key question is whether the planning approaches, which have served Singapore so well until now, will suffice to meet the emerging challenges of a changing global economy, demographic shifts, new technologies and the existential threat of climate change. Singapore as a global city is becoming more unequal and more diverse. This has the potential to weaken the social compact which has largely existed since independence and to undermine the social resilience undoubtedly needed to cope with the shocks and disruptions of the twenty-first century. The book concludes, however, that Singapore is better-placed than most to respond to the challenges which it will certainly face thanks to its outstanding systems of planning and implementation, a proven capacity to experiment and a highly developed ability to adapt quickly, purposefully and pragmatically to changing circumstances.

Lion City tells the extraordinary story of Singapore - the world's most successful city state. In 1965, Singapore's GDP per capita was on a par with Jordan. Now it has outstripped Japan. After the Second World War and a sudden rupture with newly formed Malaysia, Singapore found itself independent - and facing a crisis. It took the bloody-minded determination and vision of Lee Kuan Yew, its founding premier, to take a small island of diverse ethnic groups with a fragile economy and hostile neighbours and meld it into Asia's first globalised city. Lion City examines the different faces of Singaporean life - from education and health to art, politics and demographic challenges - and reveals how in just half a century, Lee forged a country with a buoyant economy and distinctive identity. It explores the darker side of how this was achieved too; through authoritarian control that led to it being dubbed 'Disneyland with the death penalty'. Jeevan Vasagar, former Singapore correspondent for the Financial Times, masterfully takes us through the intricate history, present and future of this unique diamond-shaped island one degree north of the equator, where new and old have remained connected. Lion City is a personal, insightful and essential guide to the city, and how its remarkable rise is shaping East Asia and the rest of the world.

"Once a centre for international trade and finance, Singapore has become a "global city." Singapore from Temasek to the 21st Century: Reinventing the Global City examines its evolution from trading port to city-state, showing how Singapore has repeatedly reinvented itself by creating or re-asserting qualities that helped attract capital, talent and trade. In the 14th century, the island's prosperity rested on regulating the regional carrying trade passing through the Straits of Melaka. In 1819, after a long period of decline, the British East India Company revived the island's fortune by making Singapore a "free" port, and trade sustained the city until the Japanese occupation and the postwar collapse of colonial rule. After independence, Singapore resumed its role as a major commercial and financial center, but added facilities to make the island a regional centre for manufacturing. More recently, it has transformed its population into an educated and highly-skilled workforce, and has made the island an education hub that is a magnet for research and development in fields such as biotechnology. Singapore's dramatic evolutionary struggle defies description as a sequentially unfolding narrative, or merely as the story of a nation. In this volume, an international group of scholars examines the history of Singapore as a series of discontinuous and varied attempts by a shifting array of local and foreign actors to optimise advantages arising from the island's strategic location and overcome its lack of natural resources."--publisher website.

How Singapore’s solutions to common problems can provide examples for other societies. Nearly everyone knows that Singapore has one of the most efficient governments and competitive, advanced economies in the world. But can this unique city–state of some 5.5 million residents also serve as a model for other advanced economies as well as for the emerging world? Respected East Asia expert Kent Calder provides clear answers to this intriguing question in his new, groundbreaking book that looks at how Singapore’s government has harnessed information technology, data, and a focus on innovative, adaptive governance to become a model smart city, smart state. Calder describes Singapore as a laboratory for solutions to problems experienced by urban societies around the world. In particular, he shows how Singapore has dealt successfully with education, energy, environmental, housing, and transportation challenges; many of its solutions can be adapted in a wide range of other societies. Calder also explains how Singapore offers lessons for how countries can adapt their economies to the contemporary demands of global commerce. Singapore consistently ranks at the top in world surveys measuring competitiveness, ease of doing business, protection of intellectual property, and absence of corruption. The book offers concrete insights and a lucid appreciation of how Singapore's answers to near-universal problems can have a much broader relevance, even in very different societies.