Singapore: One of the great cities in history

Singapore is listed as one of the great cities of modern times.


As I understand about this government, Singapore no longer belongs to Singaporeans because some believe that is the way to lose it. Singapore now belongs to the world and along the way they will carve a niche for Singaporeans.

In the same way, NY cannot be for New Yorkers only. It is part of America. Ditto Shanghai for China. Therefore Singapore for the world but we have to navigate the politics of sovereignty riding on the economic imperative, i.e., Globalization.

Nothing is worth trading our intangibles for except survival. Not sure if this is the right thing to do.

Excerpt from it: Note Singapore is one of the cities.

And so we reach the Age of the Modern City. It opens – for the purposes of this book – around 1800 though all the cities are hard to confine within a chronological compartment, spreading across centuries, defying our attempts to arrange them neatly in sections. By now, the industrial revolution was well under way, resulting in mass immigration from the countryside to the towns and the appearance of the megalopolis. London and Paris are here for the second time, since both are undergoing a dramatic change: London with its tremendous population explosion – made possible largely by improvements in sanitation – and Paris with the radical surgery of Napoleon III and Baron Haussmann. North America –which has not up to this moment put in an appearance – now looms large: in Canada we look at Montreal, in the United States at New York and Washington, Chicago and Los Angeles. Here too we witness another astonishing innovation – the skyscraper, which in turn owes its existence to the invention of the electric elevator. South of the isthmus of Panama, we cast an eye on Buenos Aires and São Paulo. Europe – apart from London and Paris – is represented by Barcelona, Berlin and Budapest; Asia by New Delhi and Singapore, Shanghai and Tokyo: and Australasia by Sydney.