Something's Fishy in Singapore

Holy system shock!

Let me tell you, coming from Sri Lanka to Singapore is about the craziest transition you can make. Sri Lanka, though beautiful, it still pretty solidly in the third world. Singapore, on the other hand, it easily one of the most technologically advanced places on earth.


I honestly didn’t know what to expect from Singapore. I knew it was going to be modern – you can hardly read anything about the place without knowing that, but what I found was really something else entirely. Every experience you have here – from landing in the airport (super modern, sleek, beautiful, efficient), to taking your first subway ride (easily the fastest, cleanest, most useable public transportation I’ve ever seen), to being able to connect to the massive, fast, free public wifi network nearly anywhere in the city, to walking through the well-planned parks and natural spaces – screams that this city is trying really hard to be an example of what a modern city should be.

The entire City State (it is both a city and a country) is built on an island (and neighboring archipelago) about three times the size of Washington D.C. It really is just one big city, even though about half of the land is set aside for parks and public spaces. The downtown business hub felt like someone took the chaos and financial imperative of Wall Street, the sparkling-clean sidewalks of downtown Portland, the coffee shop density of Sarajevo (read: every second shop on the ground level), and the strange, introverted genteel of most SE Asian countries and shook it all together: definitely a very unique place.





Probably the thing that impressed me most about Singapore was the public transportation. Coming from the perspective of someone who’s studied public transportation systems quite a bit, often in the context of how poorly designed and planned-out public transportation in the US is, Singapore was a serious eye-opener. The Singapore subway is perfect. It’s fast; you can get pretty much anywhere in the city in half an hour, and most places quite a bit quicker. It’s affordable; it cost about a dollar per ride, which is pricier than lots of public systems I’ve seen, but the purchasing power of you average Singaporean is much higher than the average global citizen as well. It’s everywhere; I don’t think it’s possible to be anywhere in the main part of the city and be more than a couple of blocks away from a station. It’s got a great supporting system; buses service most stations and take people to stops between them. And most importantly, it’s USED; people actually use it. A lot. And no wonder, it’s great. I was in public transportation heaven while I was there.

Despite the subway, however, once the engineer and tech-geek in me calmed down a bit I couldn’t shake a strange feeling I got in Singapore. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it until I had dinner with a Stanford friend, Patricia, who is now working in the much-talked-about Biopolis (a supposed modern marvel of biology and medical research and development). Patricia has a lot of experience with the Singaporean business world, specifically with the more entrepreneurial side of it, and she pointed out that, like most heavily autocratic societies, Singapore hasn’t learned how to harness the power of the individual creativity yet. Basically, the Singaporean government, which plays a big part in peoples’ lives (you can’t even chew gum in Singapore), has mandated that Singapore should be a hub for future technologies. The bricks and mortar of that (like good public systems) are something that the government has excelled in, but the soul of it is still missing. You can’t force people to be creative; you have to let it happen. So when you have a big government project like the Biopolis, which is supposed to house start-ups that will bring Singapore to the forefront of biological R&D in the 21st century, but you price the floorspace so that only big, established firms can afford to be there, you’re shooting yourself in the foot. I think the metaphor can be extended beyond the Biopolis; Singaporeans seem to be on the forefront when it comes to the material, but they have a long way to go until their culture (and government) matches a lot of the western world in term of openness and, generally, strength of individual purpose.

Anywhoo, even with the strange vibes I really enjoyed my time in Singapore. I spent most of my days wandering the city and catching up on current events back in the States, and trying to figure out how I was going to survive my next adventure: Japan! Looking forward to the chaos of that. Keep an eye out for that update!

-Clay