Reevaluating Singapore’s Greening Strategies and the Modernizing Project of Sustainability

Abstract

The Singapore case is a classic one of social control in its supreme form. In setting up the theoretical framework for this short essay, I will begin by problematizing the project of “sustainability” in Singapore as a technocratic one that began as a modernizing project of greening. The argument maintains that the outlook of sustainability today is decisively modern, technocratic and progressivist. Borrowing from Herbert Marcuse’s One Dimensional Man as an analytical frame, there is an urgency in understanding the state’s use of technology in exerting control over the society through the built environment. Hiding behind the “environmental” or “green” argument, sustainability has become synonymous with its “garden city” image and more recently with the Gardens by the Bay. Sustainability in Singapore can be fiercely bureaucratic and destructive. The modern project is one that unambiguously favored progress, hence I will like to trace sustainability at the summit of such epochal movements, culminating with a controlled state of Singapore, and suggest some ways to reveal its hidden ambitions. This framework will lead to a new conclusion about Singapore’s “green” future, especially within the ambition of a dense and vertical green city.