On 12 May 2015, a Singapore court sentenced Amos Yee, an outspoken 16-year-old video blogger who had been tried as an adult, to four weeks in jail.

Yee had been hauled up six weeks earlier on charges related to materials he had posted online: one for violating Section 298 of the country’s penal code by making “remarks against Christianity, with the deliberate intention of wounding the religious feelings of Christians in general”; another for obscenity; and another for violating the Protection from Harassment Act 2014 by making “remarks about Mr Lee Kuan Yew which were intended to be heard and seen by persons likely to be distressed”.

Most of this came as a result of Lee Kuan Yew Is Finally Dead!, a video posted four days after the death of the first prime minister of Singapore. In it, Yee offered a withering assessment of the independent city-state’s founding father, which was in stark contrast to the laudatory tributes pouring forth from elsewhere.

“On the surface, he seemed quite successful,” says Yee in the video. “He turned Singapore from a small seaport into a bustling metropolis, rife with skyscrapers and its own casino. World leaders seemed to like him, most notably Margaret Thatcher, and many foreigners and millionaires wish to invest in Singapore. But you look deeper, and you find out what the true nature of Lee Kuan Yew’s Singapore is.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Teenager Amos Yee awaits sentencing last year. Photograph: Wallace Woon/EPA

Yee’s complaints about his homeland – and there are many – include its long working hours, high income inequality and poverty rates, high taxes, low government spending on healthcare and social security, thoroughgoing materialism – and its government’s tendency to slap critics down with libel suits.

He sees it all personified in Lee Kuan Yew, who “honestly thought that money and status equated to happiness … His failure to understand how false that was really showed, leading us to become one of the richest countries in the world, and one of the most depressed. Ultimately, how do you quantify a great leader? It is by how he creates a place where people are able to live happily and prosper based on their own unique attributes. And he hasn’t.”

A fourth-generation Singaporean of Chinese descent, and a Cambridge University and London School of Economics graduate, Lee was once called “the best bloody Englishman east of Suez” by the British foreign secretary George Brown. But his years as a student in England taught him not to revere the people who ran Singapore throughout his youth: “I saw no reason why they should be governing me,” he later said. “They’re not superior.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Mourners queue to pay their respects after the death of Lee Kuan Yew in 2015. Photograph: Roslan Rahman/AFP/Getty Images

Lee first took Singapore’s reins when he led the People’s Action party (PAP), a coalition strategically formed with pro-communists, to victory in the elections of 1959 after Britain granted the island limited self-rule. Allied bombing of the Japanese-occupied island during the second world war had reduced it to a blank slate for all manner of economic, social and urban planning, and it remained shabby for years: “Utter filth and poverty,” reported the travel magazine Asia Scene in 1960. “One must see with his own eyes to believe it.”

Lee’s PAP, especially after Singapore’s expulsion from its short-lived federation with Malaysia in 1965, seized the opportunity to take the ruined former British trading post and build not just a new, modern, independent country – but the most carefully planned city in the world.

The New Yorker’s Robert Shaplen, reporting from Singapore in the 1960s, described Lee as “a brilliant, impulsive, and sometimes irascible man”, possessed of an intellectual brilliance “that has kept him remote from all but a few of his followers” – and a dream of turning his country into the economic engine of south-east Asia.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘The best bloody Englishman east of Suez’ … Lee Kuan Yew. Photograph: Laurence Harris/AP

But according to Shaplen: “One of Singapore’s – and Lee’s – problems [was] a lack of any constructive political opposition.” He would spend the rest of his career minimising the chances of its emergence, crafting a political and media environment in which the PAP could, through free and fair elections, keep a vice-like grip on its claim to power and legitimacy. In the process, Lee ensured a degree of direct control over the built environment unseen in the rest of the democratic world.

The great housing project

Singapore, which the colony’s founder, Sir Stamford Raffles, envisioned in 1819 as a “Manchester of the east”, had become a boomtown under British rule. It struggled to accommodate wave after wave of immigrants who settled there, growing haphazardly until Raffles ordered up its first proper urban plan – with gridded streets, commercial zones and ethnically segregated residential districts – in 1822.

But Singapore’s housing woes deepened for more than a century – up to the reign of Lee’s PAP and its establishment of the mighty Housing and Development Board (HDB) in 1960, the division of the Ministry of National Development charged with building public housing. It immediately began putting up 10 to 15-storey tower blocks, adding more than 50,000 units of housing to the city within the first five years of its existence.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest An old public housing estate flat in Singapore’s Katong area, built by the HDB. Photograph: Tim Chong/Reuters

Since its inception, the HDB has built more than a million flats on the island, taking the concept of social housing to a level unparalleled in any city. Today, more than 80% of Singapore’s population live in HDB buildings, and the organisation itself describes public housing as “a Singapore icon”.

First, though, the HDB had to tackle the issue of 240,000 squatters, many of them migrants from Malaysia, who had appeared in Singapore during the 1950s. Their presence necessitated, to the minds of the planners in charge, a programme of aggressive slum clearance, which provoked the kind of racially charged resistance typical of such sweeping urban-renewal efforts.

The HDB made it a priority to house low-income groups first, subsidising rents on the flats and later providing assistance from the Central Provident Fund, Singapore’s compulsory savings plan, to purchase them, creating a nation of stability-loving homeowners. But it couldn’t convince the squatters to vacate their informal settlements for the new high-rises as quickly as it would have liked.

Singapore is close to the ideal model of land-use planning in the 21st century Edward Glaeser, urban economist

Then came the still unexplained Bukit Ho Swee fire of 1961, which swept through the slum, killing four, injuring 85, leaving around 16,000 homeless, and providing the government with a chance to demonstrate the speed with which it could relocate the victims – which it did in just over two weeks – and build new housing on the site of the disaster, which it did over the next four years.

“Singapore must be one of the few places in the world where a statutory board satisfactorily completed everything it set out to do in its first five-year plan,” says the narrator of a triumphant 1965 Singapore Ministry of Culture-produced newsreel on the HDB’s first wave of buildings. “Nowhere in the world, except in Russia and Germany, is the rate of rehousing faster than in Singapore.”



The film cuts to a celebratory exhibition presenting renderings and models of the HDB’s plans for the next five years and beyond: “By far the most stimulating and exciting is the far-reaching scheme to rebuild a new city on the site of the old, dilapidated buildings and unhealthy slums.”

The footage shows Lee Kuan Yew himself amid these visions of ever-growing towers to house families and workers, and the narrator quotes Lee’s pronouncement: “The people of Singapore demand high standards of their governments, and they are prepared to work hard and are capable of higher skills. For them, the sky is the limit.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Singapore imposes corporal punishment for acts of vandalism and has a ban on the importation of chewing gum

From the beginning of Lee’s three-decade run as prime minister until its end in 1990, Singapore’s total number of public housing units grew from 22,975 to 557,575. They remain organised by ethnicity, but unlike in Raffles’ day, the PAP’s idea wasn’t to separate the Chinese, the Malays, the Indians and the rest, but to carefully integrate them – so the demographics of each block reflect the demographics of Singapore as a whole, in theory preventing the formation of volatile ethnic enclaves.

Singapore’s gross national product per capita also grew astonishingly under Lee’s rule, from US $1,240 to $18,437. External trade increased from $7.3bn to $205bn. Life expectancy rose from 65 to 74 years in a population that nearly doubled, from 1.6 million to 3 million.

Lee cultivated a reputation, as some leaders of less than fully democratic regimes do, of being able to get things done, especially when it came to infrastructure projects. He also didn’t hesitate to talk about his belief in Machiavelli’s theories of ruling by fear and what he saw as the necessity of locking up people without trial, “whether they are communists, whether they are language chauvinists, whether they are religious extremists. If you don’t do that, the country would be in ruins”. Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping reportedly fell for the “Singapore model” when he visited in 1978.

Planner’s dream or gleaming dystopia?

“Today’s Singapore is far more precisely the result of Lee Kuan Yew’s vision than the Manchester of the East ever was of Sir Stamford Raffles’,” wrote science fiction author William Gibson in Wired magazine in 1993, three years after Yew stepped down. “Imagine an Asian version of Zurich operating as an offshore capsule at the foot of Malaysia; an affluent microcosm whose citizens inhabit something that feels like, well, Disneyland. Disneyland with the death penalty.”

Gibson’s bleakly vivid view of Singapore as a stern, moralistic, highly regimented accretion of gleaming shopping malls resonated with readers and presumably gave the Singaporean government cause to reflect on the consequences of its decisions – though not before banning Wired from the island.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Singapore has embraced height. Photograph: Roslan Rahman/AFP/Getty Images

Singapore had by that time become a byword for cleanliness, efficiency and safety. Gibson, however, compared it unfavourably to Kowloon Walled City, the infamous ungoverned and informally constructed Hong Kong urban settlement – “traditionally the home of pork-butchers, unlicensed denturists and dealers in heroin” – which stood until the 1990s as the most densely populated place on Earth.

But the city-state that Lee built has also won, and continues to win, favour with urban planners and those in their realm, such as the Harvard urban economist Edward Glaeser, who makes no secret of his admiration for Singapore – not for its style of government, but for the urban form, structure and functionality it has achieved. “Singapore is close to being an ideal model of what good land-use planning looks like in the 21st century,” said Glaeser in one interview, pointing specifically to its embrace of height. “It is filled with high-density dwellings, both in the inner-city and in more suburban areas, where high-rise public housing is the model of choice.”

A high degree of economic freedom has also made Singapore “one of the most avowedly free-market countries in the world, regularly coming top or near top of surveys for liberalisation of markets”, wrote economic journalist and author John Lanchester. Yet “the government owns most of the land in the country and the overwhelming majority of the population lives in socialised housing. It’s the world capital of free markets and also of council flats.”

“We’re not Disneyland by a long shot,” said the opposition politician Kenneth Jeyaretnam in response to Gibson’s piece almost a decade later. “But it is probably true to say that if George Orwell and Philip Dick had an illegitimate child of a theme park, then this would be it.”

The Economist assesses Singapore, where the PAP has run the show for more than half a century, as a “flawed democracy”. The degree of state power that has enabled such extensive and rapidly executed feats of urban planning has also led to policies that appear to the rest of the world as draconian, such as corporal punishment for acts of vandalism, a ban on the importation of chewing gum, urine detectors installed in elevators, and expression-limiting laws of the kind that put Amos Yee on trial.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Commuters head home from Singapore’s financial district during the evening rush hour. Photograph: Edgar Su/Reuters

In the years since Gibson’s visit, the population of this 278 sq mile city-state (up, thanks to land reclamation, from 224.5 square miles at the time of independence) has increased by almost three million, many of the newcomers manual labourers in a land with no minimum wage. But the government’s 1990s designs to nurture the city into a global information-technology powerhouse appear to have stalled, resulting in something of a reversion to a manufacturing and tourism economy. “I’m afraid,” said Jeyaretnam, “we’re very much just another overcrowded Asian city with infrastructure and amenities stretched to the limit by a population bursting at the seams.”

But Singapore being Singapore, the current government has ideas about how to plan its way out of the doldrums. The HDB has begun using special software to help design its newest housing projects so as to minimise their environmental impact. It also plans to mitigate the deadening effects of strict delineation of segments of the city by creating mixed-use neighbourhood centres using “new design ideas and concepts to provide a complete live-work-play-learn environment for residents”.

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It has also continued to upgrade the rigour and real-time responsiveness of its congestion charging system, first implemented in 1975, which now brings in a revenue of $50m a year and has encouraged 65% of commuters to use public transport rather than private cars. “As a result,” said Glaeser, “you have the second densest country in the world, that has virtually uncongested streets.”

Aware of having drawn such acclaim, Singapore urges tourists to visit the Singapore City Gallery – the city-state’s monument to its achievements in urban planning, which offers “10 thematic areas and more than 50 audiovisual and interactive exhibits”, providing “an exciting, multi-sensory learning experience into Singapore’s planning journey”.

In keeping with the enduring legacy of the man Amos Yee called a dictator who “managed to fool most of the world to think he was democratic”, that journey is sure to fascinate – and confuse – the world’s urban planners for a long time yet.

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