Brand Singapore

From the point of arrival at Changi Airport, Singapore impresses the visitor: it is, possibly, the easiest and fastest clearance through immigration and customs a visitor has to face at any international airport. A queue of taxis awaits to ferry the visitor through wide highways, gaily planted with lush green trees and colourful – orange, purple, fuchsia, white – tropical bougainvilleas, passing an endless parade of high-rise housing estates, the clean pastel walls signifying a high level of maintenance, into the city in less than half an hour. This city is served by an efficient infrastructure of highways, roads and a mass rapid transit system that is still adding new lines and stations. The cars that fill the roads are all of recent vintage; heavy taxation on automobiles discourages the keeping of cars beyond ten years.

In the city, the financial and corporate district is packed with tall, grey corporate buildings. The colonial commercial district along the Singapore River has been completely rebuilt, with some of the more monumental colonial buildings restored and reused, nestled among the skyscrapers. Singapore River itself is another symbol of the new Singapore; a ten-year clean-up effort has cleared it of debris and the clean, gleaming water is now a reservoir, unlike the rivers in other Southeast Asian cities that are choked with waste. The iconic buildings in the financial district are not the banking towers but the centre for performing arts, the Esplanade – Theatres on the Bay, and the six-star Fullerton Hotel, a beautifully restored colonial edifice that used to be the central post office. Across the bay stand the three glass towers topped with the sky-park of the Marina Bay Sands casino-convention hall-hotel-shopping complex. The glitter of this downtown area is exhibited to its extreme during the F1 Grand Prix, when all of the building's lights are switched on, augmented by the spotlights on the circuit; the city literally sparkles.

Next to the Esplanade is Marina Square, which marks the end point of a long line of shopping complexes that stretches inland to Orchard Road; Singapore has been likened to an endless pedestrianised shopping mall. All the needs and desires of local and foreign consumers, from mass to exorbitant, from poor taste to aesthetically sophisticated, can be found in the shops on Orchard Road; a flâneur's paradise?