The story of urban planning in Singapore starts more than 50 years ago. On 12 September 1965, shortly after Singapore had been cast out of the recently formed Malayan federation and had subsequently declared its own independence, Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew stood before a crowd of town hall supporters and said, ‘We made this country from nothing, from mudflats! Ten years from now, this will be a metropolis. Never fear!’

By any yardstick, this was a bold, even hubristic prediction to make. Granted, 150 years of British colonial rule had created a thriving entrepôt based around the port, a well-oiled civil service and a rather picturesque skyline of neoclassical and art deco piles clustered around the southern tip of the island. But outside the central business district were mudflats and swamps, and dirt-poor kampong villages. Most of the population lived in squalid, crowded tenements. There was no reliable water supply. In real terms, the average Singaporean in 1959 was as poor as the average American in 1860.

Against this sobering background – a metropolis in a decade? But as history shows, Lee’s bold prediction came true. And then some.