Can Singapore Rediscover Itself as a Fun City?

Nothing new but still worth a read

By Andy Mukherjee
Lee Kuan Yew, the founder of modern Singapore, described his island-nation in parliament this week as "a neat and tidy place with no chewing gum, no smoking in air-conditioned places, no this, no that - not a fun place."

Lee was explaining why he has decided to overcome personal misgivings about gambling in order to back his son and current Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong's decision to scrap a four-decade-old ban on casinos in the city-state.

With China and India chipping away at Singapore's manufacturing and service businesses, the city-state can't remain a top draw in Asia for money and talent simply because it's "a healthy and wholesome society, safe and secure for everyone," as the 81-year-old leader put it.

Lee's diagnosis is correct. Still, Singapore should concentrate on having casinos to fulfill a limited objective of attracting more tourists and creating more jobs. Any goal of creating "urban buzz", which is the jargon often used in Singapore to describe what the city is lacking, is largely a serendipitous outcome. Even a government as efficient as Singapore's can't manufacture it.

Bangalore Benchmark

A build-and-they'll-come strategy doesn't guarantee urban vigour. It's hard to predict if the two casino resorts that Singapore plans to have - along with a new, more colourful downtown - will realize Lee's new vision of the city as "an economically vibrant and an exciting city to visit with top-class symphony orchestras, concerts, dramas, plays, artists and singers and popular entertainment."

Before one compares Singapore with its own chosen benchmarks for vitality - New York, London and Paris - it might pay to look closer home at a city like Bangalore, whose population of 5.7 million is similar to Singapore's 4.2 million.

While there are many things Singapore can teach Bangalore, what it can learn from the Indian city is that a lively urban landscape need not be a planned outcome.

Bangalore, which is often referred to as India's Silicon Valley, doesn't have a fraction of Singapore's amenities. Its airport is a mess; roads often exist only to join one pothole with another; water is scarce; only three-fifths of the city's garbage gets cleared; and computer-software companies keep enough fuel handy to run backup generators in case power goes out for a few days.

Bangalore's Buzz

And yet, Bangalore is buzzing. Between April and December 2004, hotels in the city charged an average US$199 a night, more than double Singapore's average room rate of US$71 in the same period and a whopping 80 percent increase from a year earlier.

It's true that Bangalore has a crunch of hotel rooms, though shopping malls, art galleries, lounge bars and pubs also are booming. Bangalore has displaced the Taj Mahal from the itineraries of visiting dignitaries. It's also emerging as a hub for popular culture, having served as host for rock stars like Elton John, Sting, Bryan Adams, Mark Knofler and Roger Waters during the last few years.

It's all being made possible by the thousands of new jobs that are being created every month. Motorola, which last year closed its semiconductor design units in Singapore and Taiwan and moved them to China and India, has 2,000 researchers in Bangalore, a number it wants to boost by a quarter each year, Indian newspaper Hindu Business Line reported this month, citing the company's chief technology officer, Padmasree Warrior.

A Series of Accidents

A series of accidents created Bangalore:

1911 - India's British rulers invited Nobel-laureate chemist William Ramsay to help select a site for a science school. Ramsay chose Bangalore.

1950s and 1960s - Independent India's first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru set up state-owned engineering companies near Bangalore to fulfill his vision of rapid industrialization. He selected Bangalore because of the talent available at the Indian Institute of Science, the school set up by Ramsay. Non-state companies like Motor Industries, a subsidiary of Germany's Robert Bosch, moved to Bangalore to supply parts.

1977 - A socialist Indian government asked IBM to leave the country after it refused to dilute its stake to 40 percent. IBM's departure became an opportunity for entrepreneurs like Azim Premji, who was then running a Bangalore-based vegetable oil business started by his father. Premji hired engineers and built his first minicomputer.

Infosys

1981 - N.R. Narayana Murthy, an engineer who wanted to become a communist politician, changed his mind and set up Infosys Technologies with US$250 in Pune in western India. He moved the company to his hometown Bangalore in 1983 after Motor Industries gave him his first order.

1996 - Global companies panicked that the year 2000 date change would crash computers. Premji's Wipro and Murthy's Infosys rewrote millions of lines of code for customers worldwide. Bangalore's software industry, which employed only 947 people in 1991, expanded rapidly.

2005 - Companies like IBM and Accenture are hiring in Bangalore to cut costs. Meanwhile, Bangalore's homegrown software makers are competing for consulting contracts outside India that were once the domain of U.S. and European technology companies.

The "sudden" buzz in Bangalore is actually just a new chapter in a 100-year-old saga. No amount of planning could have telescoped the process into 10 years.

This isn't to say the government has no role to play. Deutsche Bank economist Sanjeev Sanyal recommends a change in Singapore's trust laws because philanthropic institutions "play a very important role in cities like London and New York by funding a variety of activities such as art, architecture, environmental protection, esoteric research, and so on."

Buzz is too nebulous to plan for. Not every city that allows chewing gum - or casinos - is a fun place.