The Political Conditions for Singaporean Urban Planning post-1965

Imagine yourself as Lee Kuan Yew. After the failure merging with Malaya, you are now thrown into an impossible situation. This is how your country look like:

• Your country is tiny
  With a land area of 680 square km, your country a few times smaller than the largest cities in the world. In some way, you need to make sure that all the land use and infrastructure (roads, military camps and airbases, natural forests and parks, residential areas, seaports and airports, waste management facility, roads and highways and commercial areas) can fit into a city a few times smaller than Toronto, Barcelona or Washington.
  
• Your country is multiracial
  Your country was a piece of land claimed by a Victorian Englishmen which ended up becoming an important chess piece of the British Empire on the far East. Due to material prospects, immigrants all around Asia came to your country to make a living. At best, these different ethnic groups look at their mother country as their home and didn’t bother with other group apart from business deals; at worst, clashes in interests and value systems will lead to massive fights, strikes, subversions internally or against other ethnic groups. Some – the Chinse-speaking communists – want to take you down.
  
• Your country is poor
  While your country had its golden days of wealth under British colonialism, when it was passed to your hands, you weren’t that lucky. Your country was burnt into ashes by the Japanese 20 years ago, and the economy was slow catching up. The population was growing considerably, which exacerbates poverty levels.
  
• Your country is vulnerable
  No one wants to save your country. Not even that, everyone around you actively plots to destroy you. You tried to trade with neighboring Islamic countries. But as your country is majority Chinese – the most hated group by the local Muslim – they refuse to trade with you. Your big neighbour Indonesia, set out a terrorist attack on your country because they thought you are a puppet of Western colonialist. Who knows what your neighbour will do next.

This is SimCity hardcore mode in real life. Most people would lose their balls and give up. But Lee and his team did the opposite. Not only they wanted Singapore to survive, they want Singapore to thrive. But in order to see how they do it, we have to know more about the person who was the mastermind of all – the former Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew.

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