Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life, in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies

by Geoffrey West

Nevertheless, his basic philosophy of a planned “town and country” community has persisted to this day and has left its mark not only on the many variants of garden cities that have since sprung up around the world but also in the design concept of almost every suburban development of every city. An interesting special case of this on a large scale is Singapore. Even as the city has grown to become a major global financial center with more than five million inhabitants and has continued to build the usual ostentatious steel and glass skyscrapers, its saving grace is that it has maintained the dream of being a garden city on a grand scale. This is primarily due to its visionary top-down leader the late Lee Kuan Yew, who had the foresight in 1967 to require that Singapore develop as a “city in a garden” with abundant vegetation, open green spaces, and a sense of tropical lushness despite its chronic shortage of land. Singapore may not be the world’s most exciting city, but its ambience of greenness is palpable.