Urban Solutions Issue 20: The Science of Cities

As cities grow increasingly complex, an interdisciplinary science of cities methodology has developed to understand them. Why is this approach important for a city like Singapore? Singapore is both a city and a country: we are a country with no “countryside” outside the city. This imposes on us many more dimensions and variables compared to a typical city. For one, Singapore is the only city in the world that has a military and foreign service. Cities do not need them. Second, all the gateways that cities thrive on—ports, airports, data centres and submarine cables, and all the critical infrastructure that cities sustain themselves on such as power generation and water treatment plants—need to be within the city. There is no moat, or drawbridge that separates the city from outside. Third, Singapore cannot specialise economically—we have to have a sizeable manufacturing base, about 20% of our GDP. We cannot be a purely service economy like London, Hong Kong or New York, with high paying jobs in finance and banking at one end, and low-end jobs providing food services at the other. We need a spectrum and a thick middle layer of jobs at all levels, catering to all Singaporeans of different skills and experiences. To translate this into land terms, we devote almost 50% of our land to the military, gateways, reservoirs and manufacturing. That’s not even counting other things we need to cater for living: housing, roads and rail, nature reserves and parks. But most importantly, as a country, we must have a national identity. It is not just the economic dimension, but the social and political dimensions that we have to optimise for. Our history is such that our people did not come about and cohere naturally. Singapore began out of conviction, that different races could come together in a multiracial and meritocratic environment, and survive despite having no natural resources.

source :

https://www.clc.gov.sg/research-publications/publications/urban-solutions/view/issue-20