Singapore: world capital of the city-dormitory (Part 1)

"At least two-thirds of our miseries spring from human stupidity, human malice and those great motivators and justifiers of malice and stupidity: idealism, dogmatism and proselytizing zeal on behalf of religous or political ideas." - Aldous Huxley

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Here is an article on Singapore in the March issue (#373) of GEO France (like National Geographic), with [rough] translations of choice portions.

Spot the inaccuracies!

You can view the photos in living colour on GEO France's website.

Singapour, capitale mondiale de la cité-dortoir
(Singapore: world capital of the city-dormitory) (Part 1)


"Since 1960, this 'authoritarian democracy' has planned everything: the size of buildings, ethnic divisions. And scrupulously controls everyday life"


"This is not a corridor of a prison, but a corridor which serves studio apartments [Ed: 1 room flats?]

Built in the 1960s to tackle the shortage of housing, the first HDB flats were not built to be pretty. In this block at Bendemeer, the pipes run between gates which double as doors to each apartment"


"Inside, the walls dream of the space that is so lacking outside...

Declared 'homeowners' if they are Singaporean, families have actually a 99 year lease. Access to apartments is based on income and the number of kids [you have]"


"Less than a day away by plane from Beijing, Delhi, Melbourne or Nouméa [Ed: the capital of French New Caledonia, with a population of less than 100,000], Singapore is the Gordian knot through which passes, henceforth, all the maritime, aerial and financial flows of South East Asia. This former frontier province of the British Empire has benefitted from its independence in the 1960s in order to [?] reject its colonial heritage and wiping the slate clean on the past millennium. The objective is clear: open itself totally to 'modernity' and so accede to a radiant future. Having met this challenge 45 years later, the city-state has become the premier centre of world business. Its gigantic airport (seeing 37 million travellers in 2007) is representative of the whole island. Singapore, today, is the epicentre of the tectonic clash of the two most antagonistic cultural and political clates: Pure Hard Confucian Socialism and the Craziest Liberal Capitalism.

In 1947, the island over which the English flag still flew was a small port city with sampans and floating markets, insalubrious zones and an informal economy... Today, 5 million people live in this extraordinary political laboratory... This socio-economic miracle is the work of the cadres of the People's Action Party (PAP), the only party, ideologues of 'authoritarian democracy' led by the same family for 45 years. To counter galloping demography and impossible land expansion, they have adopted a solution which is brutal while efficacious: the total planning of the city, integating ethnic mixing without communitarianism and permanent police control.

Welcome to the Utopia created by 'Singapore's Vision', of the Great Helmsman of Independence, Lee Kuan Yew, Prime Minister from 1959 to 1990. Allied with the Americans and rabidly anticommunist, he warned against a socialism that was open to the world [?] that quickly became a large liberal economy controlled by the State. Imagine a megapolis created ex nihilo, created according to a plan"

(To be continued)

Part 2, Part 3