Singapore with Tat Haur Lee

In this episode, we turn our attention to Singapore—a city often described through the language of efficiency, optimisation, and control. A compact island state at the crossroads of trade routes and cultures, Singapore is frequently held up as a model of urban governance: clean, dense, green, orderly, and relentlessly planned. Yet beneath this carefully calibrated surface lies a far more intricate everyday urbanism. Corridors become living rooms. Void decks host weddings and wakes. Kopitiams anchor daily rituals across generations. In a city where nearly 80 percent of residents live in public housing, the spaces between buildings carry as much meaning as the buildings themselves. We are joined by Tat Haur Lee to explore how this officially ordered city is also a deeply improvised one—shaped as much by the habits, adaptations, and social life of its residents as by the master plans of its planners. The conversation explores what Singapore reveals about the limits and possibilities of top-down urban design, and what it means to build social cohesion through architecture and public space. Singapore is a city that has engineered much of its own reality—and yet the most compelling aspects of its urbanism are often those that exceed or escape the plan entirely. Check out the references from this episode.