Singapore is attempting to shake off its rather staid image and become one of the world’s leading tourist attractions. Gary Bowerman discovers grand designs in the Lion City.
Sloshing through the muddy puddles along Marina Bay waterfront, Singapore’s tourism promotion tagline: ‘A city looking towards the future… where the urban meets the traditional,’ seems slightly far-fetched. The sky is black, the rain incessant and the humidity draining. A few minutes later, as the sun lights up the wet season gloom, the shape of the Lion City’s future eases into focus.
The legions of construction cranes that dominate the horizon represent phase one of Singapore’s unequivocally stated future vision: to transform the city into a global top-table player.
In the words of its International Advisory Council for Tourism, it will create ‘novel, groundbreaking initiatives that have been identified for Singapore to leapfrog into the rank of great world cities’.
books for sale at a Singapore
market
Across Asia, urban planners are trying to fuse evolving metropolitan desires with local traditions in order to ‘genetically modify’ international cities. Singapore possesses one major advantage over its competitors, however: it is not just a city, but a nation state. And regeneration comes with the territory.
For evidence of how Singapore might realise its goal, it is necessary to step back. Following a three-year, SGD$133 million ($93 million) revamp and expansion in 2006, the National Museum of Singapore occupies a domed white building that crosses an English country manor with a wedding cake. Here, the interactive History Gallery artfully traces the past 700 years of the tiny island that has long been at the centre of change.
clearing weed at the city’s
botanic garden
Known originally as Temasek, Singapore passed between Malay kings and Portuguese, Dutch and British opportunists before Thomas Stamford Bingley Raffles secured it – ‘officially’ contrary to London’s wishes so as to not upset the Dutch – as a British trading post in 1819. Over subsequent decades, which saw the strategically advantageous opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 – two years after Singapore became a British crown colony, its position at the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula turned it into one of the world’s most pivotal trading ports.
By the late 19th century, the colony’s economic boom had created a divided society, with a vast wealth gap separating the elite from the ‘have nots’, comprising immigrant workers and peasants from across Asia.
Sir Stamford Raffles
surveys a city that is
changing rapidly
During World War II, Japan’s three-year occupation – deemed ‘Britain’s greatest defeat’ by Churchill – ended when the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Following the Japanese pull-out, division and unrest spread across Singapore, resulting in a series of legislative elections. Among the new breed of elected politicians was Lee Kuan Yew, whose People’s Action Party took full control in the 1959 general election. The vision proposed by the founding father of modern Singapore was bold and clear: to turn a divided, third-world nation into a prosperous, connected and disciplined first-world player.
The desire for improvement endures. Singapore’s economy grew by around seven and a half per cent in 2007, with the newly-signed ASEAN economic blueprint document outlining future growth plans. As one Singaporean confided to me: ‘These new plans have probably been on the books for around 15 years or so, but the [economic] timing is right now, so the government is moving forward with them.’
Marina Bay, which lies between the Straits and the Singapore River, will be the new Singapore’s emblem. The first new landmark already sits at its gateway. When it opens in early 2008 after over two years’ development, the 42-storey Singapore Flyer will be the world’s tallest ferris wheel. Standing 165m high (the London Eye is 135m high), its 28 glass capsules take 30 minutes to turn full circle. here is more – much more – to come. Marina Bay is preparing to welcome several new skyscrapers, which will extend the central business district, as well other landmark developments such as The Sail, a six-star condominium set to be Singapore’s tallest residential building. A glass bridge-walkway spanning the bay from the Singapore Flyer is also in the pipeline.
Currently a jungle of cranes, the SGD$3.6 billion ($2.7 billion) Marina Bay Sands resort will open in 2009. Owned by Las Vegas Sands Corp, the company behind Macau’s Venetian resort, it aims to be South-East Asia’s leading meeting and conventions destination. The resort will feature three 50-floor hotel towers, two 2,000-seat theatres, a casino, a shopping mall, restaurants by celebrity chefs and more than 100,000sq m of convention space.
Singapore’s determination to make a success of the new resort and a similar scale development featuring a Universal Studios theme park, being created by Genting International and Star Cruises on Sentosa Island, led it to the overturning of the ban on casino gaming in 2005.
While the reshaping of Marina Bay is a long-term project, it will be thrust onto the global stage in 28 September 2008, when Singapore hosts the world’s first night-time Formula One Grand Prix, something that’s been described by Lim Neo Chian, deputy chairman and CEO of the Singapore Tourism Board, as ‘the biggest leisure event that Singapore has ever hosted’, and as an ‘exotic addition to the championship’, by Formula One Management CEO Bernie Ecclestone.
The racetrack is currently being shaped and tested around Singapore’s eastern streets, and the Bay-front grandstand is already in place. Some 80,000 spectators are expected on race day, and hotels around the circuit – the upper floors of which will yield spectacular bird’s-eye views of the race – will be levied with a 30 per cent tax during the five days of the race event.
Singapore has moved into the F1 arena partly to meet intensifying competition for leisure and business tourists from other Asian destinations, such as Shanghai, Macau, Hong Kong, Bangkok, Mumbai, Tokyo and Seoul, all of whom have marked international sporting events as a ‘must-have’ component for any aspiring international city.
As well as the Grand Prix, Singapore will also inaugurate the night-time Sundown Marathon in May, featuring a conventional and a double-length Ultra marathon. Other franchises are adding the Lion City to their roster, including the inaugural 2008 HSBC Women’s Champions golf tournament, a companion to the men’s Shanghai event, and the Volvo Ocean Race – formerly the Whitbread Round the World Race – has added the island nation as a stopover. Singapore is also a finalist, along with Moscow, bidding for the right to host the first Summer Youth Olympic Games in 2010.
Meanwhile, construction will begin on the 35-hectare Singapore Sports Hub. Described as ‘the first and largest sports facilities infrastructure Public-Private-Partnership project in the world’, it will feature a new 55,000-seat national stadium, indoor aquatic centre, multi-purpose arena, 41,000m2 of commercial space and the existing 12,000-capacity Singapore Indoor Stadium. ingapore’s infrastructure boom does not stop there. In late December 2007, the St Regis became the first international five-star hotel to open in 11 years and several more are slated.
In January, Changi Airport opened a state-of-the-art, SGD$1.75 billion ($1.2 billion) third terminal. Dubbed T3, it can handle up to 22 million people, raising Changi’s capacity to 70 million, and features a 300m vertical garden with four cascading waterfalls and a network of 919 automated skylights. The MRT subway system is constructing a new line to connect residents of Singapore’s outer suburbs, and a tender is under way for an upgraded national broadband system that will provide speeds of 1GBps, 10 times faster than the estimated 75 per cent of homes that are web-connected currently enjoy.
Development, however, comes at a cost – namely rising land values and the knock-on impact of intense demand for property in a small nation state of around 4.7 million people. ‘Landlords are getting greedy,’ said one disgruntled business manager located in the exclusive One Raffles Quay tower near Marina Bay. ‘We will most likely have to move out of here when our contract ends next year. Rents are rising too fast.’
Singaporeans, generally portrayed as an uncomplaining people, privately raise concerns that they are being expected to pay for the nation’s high-profile transformation, which many say will benefit visitors rather than locals. Rising residential property prices are a common conversational topic, as is inflation, which hit a 16-year high last October. Much debate also centres on the raising of the Goods and Services Tax last July, from five per cent to seven per cent. ‘It started at three per cent, then four, then it went to five, then seven,’ says a Singaporean-born resident, outside one of the many large shopping malls. ‘Who knows when it will become 10 per cent.’
Sitting in the back of a taxi is usually the best way to take a city’s pulse, especially in times of upheaval. Singapore’s cabbies, a mostly genial, helpful and good-humoured bunch, are concerned about the impact of state-enforced fare hikes last December. This subject has become the common currency for in-cab conversations. ‘Prices are rising very high,’ one cabbie said. ‘Our peak morning and evening period rates were raised 35 per cent. So, many people just won’t take taxis at these times now – not unless it is raining.’
Another common complaint is the increased rates of ERP – the Electronic Road Pricing system – for entering the central business district. ‘We Singaporeans have a different name for ERP,’ the driver says, a broad smile breaking across his face. ‘Every Road Pays.’
Where to stay
Meritus Mandarin
Singapore
333 Orchard Road
Tel: (+65) 6737 4411
www.mandarinsingapore.com/
Swissôtel
The Stamford
2 Stamford Road
Tel: (+65) 6338 8585
www.swissotel.com/singapore-stamford/
FACTS AND
FIGURES
On 22 December 2007,
Singapore achieved a new
annual record for its tourism
sector when it received its 10
millionth visitor of the year.
In November 2007, the
average room rate (ARR)
in Singapore hotels was a
record high S$226, up an
impressive 29.8 per cent on
November 2006.
Big ideas
Unveiled in January 2005,
Singapore’s Tourism 2015
plan aims to triple tourism
receipts (with 2004 as
the base year) to SGD$30
billion ($21 billion), double
visitor arrivals to 17 million,
and create an additional
100,000 jobs in the services
sector by 2015.
To meet these targets a
SGD2 billion ($1.4 billion)
Tourism Development Fund
(TDF) has been set up to
support initiatives in four
areas:infrastructure development,
attracting iconic/
major events, capability and
product development.
New attractions
These include the Singapore
Flyer ferris wheel, two integrated
gaming resorts by
Las Vegas Sands (Marina
Bay) and Genting and Star
Cruises (Sentosa Island),
and the hosting of a raft of
world-class events such as
the world’s first night-time
Formula One race.
