Learning from Singapore

Singapore—I’ve been here many times in the past—including as a visiting scholar at the National University of Singapore’s Asia Research Institute in the summer of 2016—but whenever I visit, I can’t help but be amazed at the sheer convenience of being here.

Upon arriving, immigration formalities have become automated even for a Philippine passport holder like myself; I arrived at 7:10 p.m. and just one and a half hours later, I was having dinner at Lau Pa Sat—one of those popular hawker centers—with my medical friends. The metro rail transit fare from the airport to Raffles Place was not even 2 Singapore dollars—in stark contrast to Manila where going from airport to home is not only inconvenient but slow and expensive.

Of course, I am aware that Singapore is a very different context and we cannot draw simplistic analogies between this city-state and the Philippines; being a tourist or a short-term visitor in one place and a local in another can lead to unfair and inaccurate comparisons.

Neither can we embrace a romanticized vision of Singapore as a high-tech garden city without any problems. While Singapore has always figured in our political imagination as an exemplar of discipline, order, modernity, and cleanliness, critics have interrogated what they call a “benevolent authoritarianism,” raising human rights concerns and taking exception to a range of policies from the death penalty to gender (in)equality and migrant welfare. For their part, locals routinely express concern about the rising cost of living and—especially among young people—declining quality of life.

These caveats notwithstanding, there are important lessons that we—and especially our government—can learn from the city. Two things stand out for me and I will just focus on these two for this piece:

First, the ability to admit mistakes and adjust accordingly. We see in their COVID response, which was noteworthy not just for the decisive steps they took at the beginning—but for the adjustments they made when such steps were no longer tenable.

Even more remarkably, just last month, Singapore released a 92-page “White Paper,” published by the Prime Minister’s Office, in which they outlined both “what we did well” and “what we could have done better.” Under the latter, the government said that they ought to have been “decisive in imposing border measures and easing them once no longer effective” and “less definitive on mask wearing in the early days as clinical evidence was evolving,” among four other mea culpas.

In explaining the report, Deputy Prime Minister Lawrence Wong was quoted as saying: “We made our best judgment at that time, but of course, with the benefit of hindsight and what we know today, we probably could have handled certain situations differently.”

Can we hear anything close to that from our government? Something like, “We’re sorry about the face shields, they turned out to be useless and environmentally harmful; we meant well but misinterpreted the evidence.”

Or: “We really thought making children stay at home was the right thing to do, but we were needlessly overprotective. We failed to learn from other countries and did not have the courage to end one of the world’s longest educational lockdowns, exacerbating our educational crisis.”

Or maybe even something like: “We predicted that the cases will rise after school reopening, but it did not happen. We’re sorry.”

This is not to say, of course, that we did nothing right; our performance, to be fair, can be described as “average” insofar as cases, deaths, and vaccinations are concerned, and some of our government officials—both at the local and national levels—took heroic steps to respond to an unprecedented crisis. Our health professionals, likewise, stepped up to face an unknown virus, risking (and some actually losing) their lives in the process.

Still, can we not have more officials and experts who are humble enough to acknowledge some room for improvement?

The other point I want to quickly raise is Singapore’s commitment to making the city walkable—and how this is tied to its integrated urban design and the special attention to bringing trees and greenery to the cityscape. By actually creating walkways and “active mobility corridors”; making them verdant and attractive; ensuring seamless connections; and integrating the walkways with public transport, far more people are walking here than in Manila, even though we share similar climates. This, of course, is also connected to health: More people walking and running means better health and mental wellness.

Singapore is a compelling argument that with people-centered infrastructure and lots of trees, a city right in the tropics can actually be walkable, and yes, livable.

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