Or maybe they are just more visionary and resist the detrimental decline of the environmental commons spiral that comes with a private car ownership based mobility model.
Wouldn't it be the other way around? Singapore got built dense because they had anti-car attitudes.
Singapore has grown 4x since 1960. A lot of infrastructure and housing got built in that time. American cities in the era built themselves into a corner with auto-sprawl, Singapore didn't.
You could say the same about San Francisco, and yet it’s full of single family homes, outside of a very small core which is dense. The result is fewer people than would otherwise have lived in SF.
The same could have happened in Singapore, they’d just be a country with a smaller population.
Your claim that high-density housing creates a higher population is exactly backwards. A high population in a small geographic area is what creates the necessity of high-density housing.
The population of Singapore even 70 years ago was higher than San Francisco county's population is today. San Francisco also has a nation's worth of external support, Singapore only has its trade deals.
I think Singaporeans know how to run Singapore better than you do.
....I was saying Singapore displayed foresight and ran themselves well.
My point was that American cities have generally lacked such foresight.
It would have been a mistake for Singapore to build things around the car, and it has been a mistake for San Francisco to use restrictive zoning and car central planning.
In fairness, SF proper is dense, but it's tiny. The surrounding area is not dense.
>A high population in a small geographic area is what creates the necessity of high-density housing.
American cities pre-car were generally as dense as European cities. They chose the car intensive route post war. Europe initially went down that path, then pulled back. And Singapore was wise enough not to pursue it.
Their geography surely focussed minds a bit, but they could have made bad choices rather than good ones. Many cities have.
I said dense, not populous. Density incorporates the area you're settled in.
You can see in those charts that both nyc and london had peak density in 1950, as their populations declined after that point, while their area didn't increased. They both reversed that trend around 1990.
NYC has a much higher density than london though: 27,751/sq mi vs. 14,670/sq mi
This was probably roughly accurate in relative terms around 1950 as well, as NYC and London had similar populations in different areas back then.
Singapore increased its density consistently and greatly in the same time period.
>Or maybe they are just more visionary and resist the detrimental decline of the environmental
Have you been to Singapore? Because if you have and think they are some green wonderland because they require an expensive purchase permit for a car and you need to get rid of it after 5 or 8 years is because they’re “earthy”, you are sadly mistaken.
It’s 99% population control, 1% environment. The city/state is amazing; but not always in the good way. I recommend you visit.
Green is one thing they are not. They talks good game about biomass (burning trash) and solar, but the entire country glows at night, it earns its name as The Air-Conditioned City.
No, it has to do with the fact that Singapore is a small place, which would completely choke if they would not restrict the use of private cars via heavy levies.
And regarding socialist ethos: Singapore is, arguably, the most capitalist and business friendly place in the world.
You're confusing socialism with 'government involvement' -- admittedly a mistake many Americans seem to make.
'Socialism' in the classical sense is definitely business unfriendly. Its foundation is a critique of private ownership of factories, workplaces, and other 'means of production'
Socialism means social management of the economy. That need not involve the state at all. And it may not describe China at all, depending on your definition of 'social', regardless of what the Communist Party says about itself.
"Socialist" certainly does not describe Singapore, which neither calls itself socialist, nor acts socialist.
