Keeping ourselves Open to Learning

The Sunday Times
June 29, 2008
SUNDAY WITH WARREN FERNANDEZ

Keeping S'pore open to learning from others

While sharing its experiences with others, Republic should guard against hubris and smugness

By Warren Fernandez

Civil servants, it has been said, are meant to be seen, not heard. Their job is to toil quietly, impartially, diligently behind the scenes, to keep the system running.

'No comment' was the choice phrase of top bureaucrats, who preferred to leave the talking to the politicians.

Well, times appear to have changed somewhat. Last week, top officials and planners from Singapore were everywhere at the Singapore International Water Week and World Cities Summit, held at the Suntec convention centre.

They took part in panel discussions, sharing Singapore's development experiences on urban planning, easing traffic congestion, water recycling and waste management.
They fielded questions on the lessons learnt, difficulties faced and challenges that remain. They exchanged views with fellow planners from around the world and, hopefully, learnt as much from them along the way.

Several Singapore agencies had also taken booths at the conference convention, selling their story and expertise to the world.

Now, you can tell that Singapore has reached a different plane when 6,000 delegates from around the world fly here to discuss ecologically sustainable development, and point to Singapore's experience as one way forward. Many were full of unsolicited praise for what they saw being done in Singapore, and wanted to know more about how it had been made to happen.

It was not so long ago when Singapore officials would fly to wherever anyone would give them a hearing to tell them about Singapore and its prospects, hoping that they might learn about this tiny island they had probably never heard of, rather than learn anything from it.

So, the international recognition and accolades that Singapore is now enjoying are well and good. Having strived hard to get to this point, it is right that Singapore should invest in, and reap dividends from, the brand name it has built over the years. Doing so will help the Republic make the leap to the next stage of its development.

On a more altruistic level, it is also fitting that having garnered advantage by learning from the world - or standing on others' shoulders, as Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew put it last week - Singapore now adopts a big-hearted approach and shares its experiences to help others tackle development challenges, and thereby improve the lives of millions around the world. In doing so, it makes itself useful to the world.

Yet, even as Singapore welcomes the rush of officials from Bangladesh to Bahrain, all asserting their desire to emulate Singapore, it is worth keeping our feet on the ground and being mindful of a danger that lurks: a certain smug, let-me-teach-you-how-it-is-done attitude, and dare I repeat the word, complacency, could well set in.

This could arise from a creeping sense that we have seen and learnt it all before, and are somehow smarter and usually do it better than others. We've all heard it before - that very Singaporean tendency to say, 'in Singapore, we do it like this...'

Such hubris would be foolhardy, for too many things in Singapore are the result of pragmatic leaders travelling, observing and adapting ideas from elsewhere to suit our circumstances. The decision to site Changi Airport at the eastern tip of the island so that airplanes would approach it over the sea and so reduce noise pollution, or the idea to make vehicles go for smoke tests regularly, both arose from observations that MM Lee made while visiting Boston in the United States, as he recounts in his memoirs.

This looking, listening and learning will have to continue.

Sure, having arrived at this point in its development, there will be many new challenges that require innovative responses not found anywhere else.

Even so, effort will have to be redoubled to keep the system open to ideas and differing perspectives, and willing to consider experiences from everywhere, suitably adapted to our needs.

Take, for example, a robust presentation at last week's summit by the former mayor of Honolulu, Mr Jeremy Harris. He spoke of ideas which, on the face of it, might sound a little kooky, but appear to have worked. These range from running city buses on reprocessed, used cooking oil to a geographic information system which provides a three-dimensional picture of the city, right down to every street and sewer, thereby aiding urban planning.
Every drain manhole in the city comes with a barcode so that workers know exactly what lies where and what needs to be done in the course of city maintenance without endless - and wasteful - digging up of the roads.

Now, these are two simple ideas the average Singaporean will be able to relate to, and wish the authorities here might learn from.

Of course, borrowing ideas from abroad has to be contextual. You can't make urban plans for Bangkok in some hip design studio in Barcelona, or figure out how to fix problems in Macau by just transplanting ideas from Melbourne.

Instead, planners will have to listen to, and learn from, what their own peoples want, and judge what novel ideas they might take to or what they would reject as ill-suited to their own lives.

So whether you are running the Singapore Arts Festival, envisioning the new downtown or thinking up ways to improve The Straits Times, the challenge is always to figure out how far to embrace the bold and the new, what features to introduce, and at what cost, while keeping true to the basic needs and desires of the broad sweep of people the facilities and services are meant for.

That, ultimately, is the test of how 'liveable' a city is; namely, how much it meets the needs and aspirations of the people who live in it.

Getting this largely right, in my view, has been a major part of Singapore's success story over the years, and will be critical as it strives to make this city even more vibrant and liveable in the future.

Get it wrong, and you end up with pseudo conservation projects, like the cleaned-up Chinatown or the long forlorn Malay Village; or falling attendances at major public events; or well-meaning initiatives, like giving HDB precincts fancy condominium-like names such as Toa Payoh Bloom, that the community just does not take to.

World Bank vice-president for the East Asia and Pacific region James Adams summed up this challenge well when he said in a speech at the summit that urban planners need to have a 'good eye' and a 'good ear' for what works best in the cities they serve.

He said: 'A successful city is one with a vision, a good idea of its problems and needs, a good ear for what its citizens want and need, and a good eye for what other cities are doing.
'Successful city management requires knowledge, creativity, vision, transparency and accountability. And smart cities see what's ahead and plan accordingly by investing in housing, transport and amenities to attract the best and brightest to live there.'
Sound familiar?

warren@sph.com.sg
(Thanks to Sunday Times)