Singapore and Cities of the Future

The Reactor Magazine (formerly Tor.com) has published an interesting article about SF writer Arkady Martine and her reactions to visiting Singapore, a city that has sometimes been described as a "city of the future". Martine, the author of the Hugo winning novels A Memory Called Empire and A Desolation Called Peace (two books that I very much liked), is a trained city planner, something that comes across in her fiction. 

The article goes into some detail about her reactions to Singapore and how cities have been represented in science fiction. (Singapore has been used as the setting for several movies and TV shows including the third season of Westworld. 

“I don’t feel like you can sanitize a city, that it’s possible to do so,” she says. “Cities inevitably complicate… they’re full of a lot of people very close together; it’s the best thing about them and the worst thing about them at the same time.” And so in this dense mess of humanity, spontaneity and practicality tend to arise in unexpected ways – the use and reuse of space by its actual inhabitants rather than its designers. “So can a writer write a city of the future that isn’t authentic? Of course. If you’re thinking about designing an actual one, as soon as you’ve got it, it’s going to be used by people in it and it will develop forms of authenticity anyway.”

Martine, who has spent years living in multiple cities around the world, is still impressed by Singapore’s futuristic architecture, especially in the way greenery and nature are functionally incorporated into buildings to improve ventilation, air circulation, and heat management. “I’d only read about it in theory, I hadn’t seen it, and I’m really glad I got to,” she adds. “It’s an interesting place, it’s different than others I’ve been in.” She doesn’t feel like Singapore is a definitive city of the future or a “science fictional” place in the way that it is sometimes discussed, in games of online broken telephone about the payoff between the will of a one-party state and having omnipresent “smart” future-forward infrastructure. I agree with her that being here is easy; it is easy to be told what to do on the train or how to take the bus, where to stand or buy a ticket, but yet, Martine also finds it more complicated than the cities of her childhood.