Singapore is Really Not a City

This was a reply which i had to cx post on singapore being not a city but a country. He had an elaborate discussion about the overemphasis of singapore as a city, comparing to london, new york, sydney and so on, but losing the focus that we are more than just a city, we are a nation.

well, i feel planning spore is a very tricky issue, and the notion of a city is mainly coined by foreign critics who view spore as a state without a soul, and therefore we cannot be called a country. and they feel that we are too artificial in the making, which i feel that they are right to a certain extent. we seem to be following the global trend, making bold steps in achieving a "global city" status, since 65. however, whether these thematic research hubbish and entertainment developments serve to better our economy is debatable... and such developments are just making singapore seem as if we're "trying too hard", of which some were failures, like crazy horse and the previous themeparkish sentosa... we seem to be constantly reinventing ourselves, seeking or replicating global trends... but if we dun try hard enough, we may not survive too...or rather do we need these architectural wonder gimmicks (sports hub, IR, vivo city, helical footbridge) for survival? no doubt they "look good" (it's quite subjective actually) in our environment but who are the designers of these icons? they are not singaporeans and it seems that they just can't get it right in spore too...

another view or justification for modelling singapore after global characteristics would be our lack of real history. as much as we want to claim our chinese, indian or malay roots, are they part of our history or did our history started from 1819 or 1965? if one defines the starting point of our history to be 1965, we can then justify our actions in pursuing global characteristics and developing our "rojak city"... in this respect, singapore is more fortunate than china, esp beijing or shanghai, cuz they have a history to defend, but we don't. it seems more brutal tearing apart thousand of years of history and replacing them with iconic infrastructure that claims to be sensitive to the chinese-ness of the place...but to say that we don't have a history is disrespectful too, i would prefer to see us as being part of history making... maybe our distinct character 100 years down the road would be a surreal mixed country, the only country in the world to have its history and city built on global forces, trends and demands, we become not an asian country but a global country... hmm, but i dunno how will i react if it really happens...

it seems that nothing is really original in city spore, except for our new towns, which we can try to claim originality... and i totally agree with you that our focus should be in the heartlands, developing the uniqueness of each location... and that's why i'm hoping sometimes that ura can revise their master plan, and give equal importance to the new towns as compared to marina bay... if you look at marina bay master plan, it has been revised twice, the focus in 1996 seems to be different from now... it was probably due to asian financial crisis where the govt didn't really know what to do with the over-reclaimed land (the land was left stagnated for about 8 years before development started again) and it had to revisit its strategy and the new master plan was developed as such... marina bay is constantly subjected to economic forces, while our heartland is less susceptible to such impacts, and thus maybe it's more worthwhile to concentrate our efforts in our heartlands rather than the city. lastly, i guess if nation building can brought to a microlevel, it would start from the heartlands and not our city centre...