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A zine produced by members of ARCH 5602, Kean University School of Public Architecture

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Vol. 1

Letter from the Editor - 
Davis Richardson
Reclaiming 432 Park Ave - Kamila Diaz Calderon
Ultrathin Worlds - 
Anyi Liranzo-Payamps
Finance Over Function - 
Jared Britton
The Housing Shepherd - 
Kacper Kowal
Livestream Dystopia - 
Jake Haenggi
VR Architecture - 
Ryan Barbour
Metaverse Architecture - 
Danny Gavino
From Fi-Fi to De-Fi - 
Scott Gleason
Realistic or Reality? - 
Stephan Argent
Dubaifying Saudi Arabia- 
Rasha Labibidi
NEOM’s Sustainability Mirage - Andrew Lazarte
Living in the Model - 
Bryan Tome
Planting the Illusion - 
Lauren Taravella
Critical Regionalism - 
Nolan Aucone

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CGZ-VOLNO1-ARCH5602-FA2025-E12

Living in the Model: 
Architecture, Control, and the 
Cost of Urban Success in Singapore 
Bryan Tome



Singapore is frequently presented as a model global city: dense but efficient, modern yet environmentally conscious, exacting yet happy. In architectural discourse, it is often framed as proof that globalization can be managed responsibly through good planning, strong governance, and technical excellence. Its skyline of carefully calibrated towers, lush sky gardens, and infrastructural precision has become a visual shorthand for twenty-first-century urban success.1 Yet, this reputation risks foreclosing deeper inquiry into how Singapore’s architectural and urban systems actually function and who they ultimately serve.

Singapore operates less as a lived city or collective home than as a carefully designed global product optimized to circulate capital, labor, and image over supporting a normal civilian life. Architecture in Singapore functions primarily as infrastructure for economic performance and reputational management, not as a cultural or democratic practice. Drawing on Rem Koolhaas’s Singapore Songlines and Keller Easterling’s theory of Extrastatecraft, this essay examines how Singapore’s built environment facilitates global capital flows, disciplines labor, and projects a controlled image of ecological and social responsibility that obscures structural inequality.2 Architecture here does not merely symbolize globalization but actively realizes its goals.

Rather than treating Singapore as an ethical or humanitarian exception in global capitalism, it can be argued that it is one of capital’s most refined and successful products, an urbane system where infrastructure, governance, and spectacle are seamlessly integrated to perform “success” on a global stage. In doing so, it raises a fundamental question for architectural theory and practice: what is lost when cities are designed to function as exportable models and investment platforms rather than as environments shaped by and for the people who live in them?3

The island city-state’s urban trajectory cannot be separated from its political origins. Emerging as an independent nation in 1965 after more than a century of British colonial rule, Singapore faced acute economic vulnerability, limited natural resources, and serious regional instability.4 The broader geopolitical context of the Cold War — particularly the Vietnam War during the spread of communist and leftist movements across Southeast Asia — strongly shaped Singapore’s internal political and economic direction. Western powers viewed Singapore as a strategic wall against socialism in the region, while domestic leadership framed rapid economic development as a matter of national survival.5

Under Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew and the People’s Action Party, political opposition, labor unrest, and union organizations were gradually suppressed in favor of stability, productivity, and foreign investment.6 Trade unions were consolidated under state oversight, strikes were restricted, and dissent was regulated through both legal mechanisms and spatial control. This narrowing of political pluralism was not presented as dictatorship but as rational pragmatism necessary for growth. Urban development became the physical expression of this ideology: efficient, rational, and tightly managed.7

Rather than expressing state power through monumental civilian architecture, Singapore invested heavily in infrastructure, housing, ports, roads, and logistics systems that emphasized functionality over representation. By functionality over representation, this does not mean the absence of design or aesthetics, but a shift away from symbolic or monumental expression often practiced by authoritarian regimes toward efficiency, performance, and manageability. This approach produced an urban environment that appeared neutral and apolitical while embedding systems of discipline and control into everyday space. These systems were achieved through standardized public housing models, strict planning regulations, integrated transportation networks, and carefully managed public spaces, where governance operates through routine use rather than overt symbolism. In this way, power is exercised quietly through how people move, live, and inhabit the city rather than through grand architectural statements.8

The Housing and Development Board (HDB) is frequently cited as one of Singapore’s greatest urban achievements. Providing public housing to more than 80% of the population, HDB estates are praised internationally for their affordability, maintenance, and integration with transit, schools, and amenities.9 Yet, beyond welfare provision, HDB housing operates as a powerful mechanism of social regulation. Allocation policies, ethnic quotas, and standardized unit layouts enforce a managed model of citizenship in which diversity is spatially distributed, monitored, and depoliticized instead of actively negotiated.10 Architecturally, HDB blocks represent a form of infrastructural modernism: efficient, repetitive, and flexible units designed to be easily maintained and scaled. Domestic life is folded into a broader logistical network that links housing to labor markets, transportation systems, and state services by coordinating residential location with employment centers, embedding estates within mass transit corridors that structure daily routines while tying access to housing and mobility to income thresholds, employment stability, and family status. Through this alignment, HDB estates function not only as places of residence but as instruments that synchronize living, working, and governing within a single spatial system.11

Public space in HDB estates avoids decks, corridors, courtyards, and shared facilities, carefully calibrated to promote acceptable forms of social interaction while discouraging others. Surveillance is rarely overt; instead, it is embedded in spatial design, visibility, and proximity.12 In this way, architecture mediates between welfare and control. While materially improving living standards, it normalizes a conception of urban belonging grounded in compliance with spatial, social, and behavioral norms. Housing becomes less a platform for political life than an instrument through which urban order is quietly maintained.13

Singapore’s emergence as a global economic hub is rooted in its early and strategic deployment of special economic zones (SEZs). The Jurong Industrial Estate, established in 1969, represented a major turning point in the country’s urban and economic development. Designed explicitly to attract multinational corporations, Jurong offered tax incentives, streamlined regulations, and infrastructure optimized for industrial production and global trade.14 Keller Easterling’s concept of “extrastatecraft” offers a useful lens through which to understand this spatial strategy. Extrastatecraft refers to zones of governance that operate through technical standards, organizational systems, and infrastructural protocols rather than overt political representation.15 These spaces do not exist outside the state but alongside it, allowing states to integrate into global capitalism without visibly altering national political frameworks. In Singapore, SEZs function as architectural and logistical interfaces between local governance and global markets.16

The architecture of Jurong is deliberately generic: warehouses, factories, road networks, and ports designed for maximum adaptability and efficiency.17 This aesthetic neutrality is deceptive. By minimizing local identity and cultural specificity, such spaces privilege capital mobility over social rootedness. Over time, this extrastate logic expanded beyond industrial zones into financial districts, airports, and mixed-use developments. Singapore increasingly operates less as a civic city and more as a seamless platform for global economic flows.18

One of the more celebrated features of Singapore’s global image is its integration of greenery into dense urban development. Sky gardens, green roofs, vertical parks, and curated urban forests form the city’s architectural branding. Landmark projects such as Marina Bay Sands and Jewel Changi Airport exemplify this synthesis of spectacle, infrastructure, and environmental imagery.19 While these projects are often presented as models of sustainable architecture, their ecological function must be considered alongside their symbolic role. Green architecture in Singapore operates as a form of visual governance—a means of projecting environmental responsibility without fundamentally challenging consumption patterns, energy dependence, or global supply chains.20 Rem Koolhaas’s Singapore Songlines describes the city as one where nature itself has become programmable.21 Greenery is no longer wild or oppositional but curated, quantified, and maintained through complex systems and invisible labor. Sustainability functions less as a political commitment and more as an aesthetic language that supports economic legitimacy.22 The danger lies in equating environmental appearance with environmental justice. Singapore’s green image helps stabilize its global reputation while diverting attention from inequalities embedded in labor systems, resource extraction, and transnational production networks.23

Singapore’s global success depends heavily on migrant labor, particularly in construction, infrastructure maintenance, and domestic work. Migrant workers from South and Southeast Asia are essential to building and sustaining the city, yet they remain largely absent from its architectural imagery and public narratives.24 Worker dormitories are typically located on urban peripheries or in industrial zones, physically separated from the spaces that symbolize prosperity and global success.25 Although labor conditions in Singapore are often characterized as more regulated than in other regional contexts, numerous reports document overcrowding, limited mobility, and chronic precarity.26 Architecture plays a direct role in sustaining this invisibility by spatially segregating labor from representation. The clean, green city is made possible through design strategies that hide the social and human costs of its upkeep.27 This separation reinforces a broader global logic in which certain bodies are rendered temporary, replaceable, and politically marginal.28

Singapore’s reputation rests on its ability to make power appear efficient and beneficent, but such success comes at a cost. Architecture in Singapore operates less as a space of civil negotiation or cultural life than as an infrastructural system designed to stabilize economic flows and manage perception.29 The city is not merely lived in; it is branded, optimized, and exported as a model. Understanding Singapore in this way challenges architects and urbanists to rethink what it means to design in light of globalization. The most consequential forms of architecture today may not be iconic towers or monumental landmarks, but the quiet systems that discipline everyday life while appearing natural and inevitable.30 In this sense, Singapore is not simply a city to emulate, but a critical case study through which to examine how architecture participates in the production of global inequality under the screen of order, sustainability, and progress.31


  1. Rem Koolhaas et al., Singapore Songlines: Portrait of a Potemkin Metropolis (Singapore: ORO Editions, 2010), 7–12. 
  2. Keller Easterling, Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space (London: Verso, 2014), 11–16.
  3. Neil Brenner and Nik Theodore, “Cities and the Geographies of ‘Actually Existing Neoliberalism,’” Antipode 34, no. 3 (2002): 349–379.
  4. C. M. Turnbull, A History of Modern Singapore, 1819–2005 (Singapore: NUS Press, 2009), 265–280.
  5. Garry Rodan, The Political Economy of Singapore’s Industrialization (London: Macmillan, 1989), 38–52.
  6. Francis T. Seow, The Media Enthralled: Singapore Revisited (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1998), 93–110.
  7. Chua Beng Huat, Communitarian Ideology and Democracy in Singapore (London: Routledge, 1995), 24–30.
  8. Easterling, Extrastatecraft, 70–75.
  9. Housing and Development Board (HDB), Public Housing − A Singapore Icon (Singapore: HDB, 2015), 4–6 
  10. Chih Hoong Sin, “Ethnic Housing Policy in Singapore: Social Engineering in Practice,” Environment and Planning A 34, no. 2 (2002): 515–529. 
  11. Ananya Roy, “Civic Governmentality: The Politics of Inclusion in Singapore,” Antipode 41, no. 1 (2009): 159–179. 
  12. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1977), 195–203. 
  13. Chua Beng Huat, Public Housing in Singapore: Social Construction of an Ethnic Identity (Singapore: NUS Press, 1997), 112–120. 
  14. Linda Low, Industrial Policy and Development in Singapore (Singapore: Singapore University Press, 1998), 76–90. 
  15. Easterling, Extrastatecraft, 21–29. 
  16. Saskia Sassen, Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 222–230. 
  17. Rem Koolhaas, “Generic City,” in S, M, L, XL (New York: Monacelli Press, 1995), 1248–1255. 
  18. Brenner, “Global Cities, Glocal States,” Cities 15, no. 1 (1998): 1–19. 
  19. William S. W. Lim, Asian Ethical Urbanism (Singapore: World Scientific, 2015), 88–95. 
  20. Timothy Morton, Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 41–48. 
  21. Koolhaas et al., Singapore Songlines, 45–50. 
  22. Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Zone Books, 1994), thesis 4. 
  23. Erik Swyngedouw, “Impossible ‘Sustainability’ and the Postpolitical Condition,” in The Sustainable Development Paradox, ed. Rob Krueger and David Gibbs (New York: Guilford Press, 2007), 13–40. 
  24. Brenda S. A. Yeoh and Shirlena Huang, “Foreign Domestic Workers and Home-Based Care,” Social & Cultural Geography 9, no. 7 (2008): 721–737. 
  25. T. E. Banerjee et al., “Dormitories and the Spatial Politics of Migrant Labor in Singapore,” Urban Studies 56, no. 3 (2019): 540–556. 
  26. Human Rights Watch, “‘They Told Us to Work and Hope’: Migrant Workers in Singapore,” (New York: HRW, 2020). 
  27. Keller Easterling, Medium Design (London: Verso, 2021), 92–97.
  28. Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” Public Culture 15, no. 1 (2003): 11–40. 
  29. Koolhaas, Singapore Songlines, 9. 
  30. Easterling, Extrastatecraft, 248–255. 
  31. David Harvey, Spaces of Global Capitalism (London: Verso, 2006), 117–123.