Singapore is a model of successful green regeneration (Image: Getty)
An plagued by water shortages, and flooding, with a divisive political climate and uneducated, largely illiterate electorate.
It sounds like the Platonic ideal of a developing country – and that is what was circa the 1960s, freshly separated from Malaysia and only two decades out of British colonial control. It presented quite a challenge for Lee Kuan Yew, the Southeast Asian island’s first Prime Minister – and one he rose to, beyond any reasonable doubt.
Fast forward 60 years and Singapore is now a favourite escape of billionaires – with its most affluent citizen Eduardo Saverin, the co-founder of Facebook – and a global powerhouse in biodiversity and the shipping and transport industries.
How did Prime Minister Yew do it? Dogged determination played a definite role. In the years after his 1959 election, after weathering strained relations and an ultimate break with the Malaysian government, the statesman and lawyer unveiled his vision for a ‘garden city’, with lush green landscapes and grass-clad infrastructure mirroring the economic prosperity of its citizens.
It certainly seemed like a high ask, and Yew wasn’t without his detractors, then or now – he is sometimes described as a ‘benevolent dictator’ for his heavy-handed enforcement of initiatives like racial integration, bringing in English as a main language and creating a mandatory savings system for all workers.
One of the main issues facing the island state was a lack of clean drinking water. Singapore is a small land mass of just 710 square kilometres with no natural aquifers and almost no groundwater, and rapid urban development was exacerbating the problem.
“In the 1960s, Singapore was like any other developing country – dirty and polluted, lacking proper sanitation and facing high unemployment,” Masagos Zulkifli, minister for social and family development in the People’s Action Party, told the UN’s Environment Programme.
“These challenges were particularly acute, given our constraints as a small island state with limitede resources; we did not even have enough drinking water.”
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Lee Kuan Yew has been described as a benevolent dictator for his determined innovation (Image: Getty)
The government’s solution was to develop a revolutionary system of alternative water sources called the Four National Taps – comprising water from local catchment areas, imported water, recycled water and desalinated water, with the diverse supply ensuring at least a relative national security.
Before those reforms were brought in, towards the end of the 20th century and beginning of the 21st, the country relied on new waterworks infrastructure – against the backdrop of other long-term reforms similarly born of Prime Minister Yew’s ambition.
Alongside tree planting schemes, which lend themselves to the gorgeously verdant appearance of the city-state today, the government’s creation of the Housing and Economic Development Boards played a pivotal role in transforming Singapore into a country of the future.
The former ensured better living standards for citizens, replacing slums with affordable housing and the latter set the island in good stead to become the global financial force it is today.
The city is now a leading global powerhouse in financial and sustainability spheres (Image: Getty)
“Our approach has been to build a liveable and sustainable city, through pragmatic policymaking based on sound economic principles and science,” Mr Zulkifli said, “[alongside] a focus on long-term planning and effective implementation; and the ability to mobilise popular support for the common good.”
Singapore undeniably benefited from having a single, centralised government with its best interests at heart – but its trajectory from East India Company trading post to half-illiterate, slum-filled land mass and, finally, the country with the fourth highest GDP per capita in the world is impressive by any measure.
Its population is now 98 percent literate, it consistently ranks highly for its standards of living and education system and, according to the Green City Index of 2016, it was at one point the greenest city in Asia. Despite setbacks from , the state’s GDP is expected to rise by 2.1 percent in 2024 – and, as well as being a financial powerhouse, its ‘City in a Garden’ moniker is indicative of Singapore’s beautiful meshing of the natural and the urban.
Whether Prime Minister Yew foresaw the iconic architecture of Marina Bay Sands and the indoor gardens of Jewel Changi Airport when he first dreamed of the green metropolis back in 1967, it’s unlikely his ambitions would have dared to aim for the heights that modern-day Singapore has so triumphantly achieved.