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Abstract

Chinese

This article uses the concept of the “city as showroom” to describe an emergent logic shaping urban development that stems from the growing importance of “urban solutions” as an industry. Focusing primarily on Singapore, the article examines how certain urban districts and high-profile sites are conceptualized as “showrooms” for the infrastructure and urban technologies they aim to export around the world. The idea of the “city as showroom” combines aspects of the curation of a city’s image through showcase districts, as well as “testbed urbanism” seen in certain smart-city projects. Singapore's need to reproduce itself as a model of urban solutions has led to a phenomenon I characterize in this article as the “city as showroom”–whereby the planning and design of entire districts is increasingly informed by a need to embed and display urban solutions technologies in situ within specific areas of the city. The case studies are used to explore and examine an emergent urban development logic in the age of urban solutions. The discussion examines potential implications of Singapore's approach, both advantages and risks.

Keywords

Asia economic processes infrastructure place branding planning technology/smart cities theory

Introduction

The viewing platform atop the Supertrees at Singapore’s Gardens by the Bay affords tourists an iconic view of the Singapore skyline—the foreground provides a close-up view of the photovoltaic solar panels atop the giant tree-like trellises. The Supertrees are iconic symbols of Singapore, but they are also functioning pieces of a biomass waste-to-energy generation system. Some of the Supertrees are covered in solar panels, funneling exhaust from a biomass-to-energy system underneath the gardens. A Singaporean company, Ecowise, processes biowaste from across the island, transforming it into pellets that are incinerated at facilities like the one below Gardens by the Bay. The steam generates electricity which is sent to a substation where it is mixed with energy from the grid. Heat exhaust is used to warm the glass conservatories where tropical and warm climate plants are displayed, while hot water is channeled to an “absorption chiller” where it produces cold water to cool the conservatories housing temperate climate flora. The gardens are an icon of Singapore as well as a showroom for Singapore’s emergent “urban solutions” industry.

Cities like Singapore have long sought to remake their image in the global urban imagination (Acuto, 2022), beautifying their environment to attract visitors and foreign investment, and promoting themselves through speculative urban megaprojects (Chu and He, 2022; Shatkin, 2017) or flashy city exhibition halls (Fan, 2015). Singapore has become a reference point for successful urban planning and development. It has capitalized on this reputation to export its “development model” abroad, particularly in the Global South, with mixed results (Chua, 2011; Pow, 2014).¹ Recently, the city state has promoted its expertise in the development of “urban solutions,” a term that encompasses everything from sustainable energy technology to green buildings, smart-city systems and transport infrastructure (Bok, 2024). This article posits that Singapore’s imperative to reproduce itself as a model and exporter of urban solutions has led to a form of urban development and planning that embeds and showcases urban solutions in situ within physical spaces of the city—in new industrial districts, in pilot zones, and in iconic tourist destinations like Gardens by the Bay. This article develops the concept of the “city as showroom” to describe what I argue is an emergent logic shaping urban development in Singapore and beyond that stems from the growing importance of developing showcase districts to market “urban solutions” to potential customers.

The notion of the “city as showroom” emerged from several years of working as a researcher in Singapore as well as a year of fieldwork and interviews with govern-ment planners and officials in various Singaporean agencies and companies. Through discussions with various officials and employees directly involved in the industry, I realized that many projects within the city were conceived of as showrooms for emerging technologies that the Singaporean state is trying to cultivate. The article offers a new theorization of urban development logic in the age of urban solutions, one that is grounded in empirical study and observation of urban projects within Singapore.

The following are the key questions addressed in this article:

How has the rise of the urban solutions industry in Singapore transformed the spatial planning of new districts in the city state?

How did Singapore’s particular form of “showroom urbanism” emerge from its unique political economy, developmental history, and economic imperatives as a small island?

Methods and case selection

The article is organized into three main sections. First, I review relevant literature on the rise of the urban age, and the related notion of urban and technological solutionism for cities that has increasingly pervaded international policy discourse and developed into an industry dedicated to the provision of corporate-produced solutions for global urban problems. The second section focuses on the evolution from early government-to-government efforts to export Singapore’s model abroad, to a more recent evolution into a full-fledged commercial industry of “urban solutions” marketed by Singaporean state-linked commercial firms. The third section focuses on how certain urban districts within Singapore have been planned and constructed as “showrooms” for this technological expertise, a phenomenon I theorize as the “city as showroom.” The cases draw on interviews with key informants, discourse from speeches and plans that reveal official narratives behind various urban projects, and maps and other visual material to reveal ways in which districts are planned to “showcase” various urban solutions in situ within Singapore. Finally, the conclusions and discussion analyze the implications of Singapore’s “showroom urbanism” for the way technology is developed and embedded within cities worldwide.

Methodologically, the article draws on several years of fieldwork and interviews with over 30 individuals based in Singapore hailing from government agencies involved in technology deployment, and urban solutions firms, including former and current employees. Additionally, the work draws on the author’s 18 months of employment experience at a Singaporean research center focused on cities. The interviews were conducted between 2022 and 2024, after the author’s employment had ended. The job opportunity, however, provided extended time and context for understanding the ecosystem of urban solutions in Singapore. This included meetings with companies and government agencies, attending conferences such as the World Cities Summit in 2018, and conversations with other researchers. This article is an example of “constructivist grounded theory” (Allen and Davey, 2018) in that the concept of the “city as showroom” was developed following extensive conversations, interviews, and site visits. The case studies draw on comments and ideas expressed by employees involved in the projects along with promotional texts of the projects. Singapore is an “extended” and “unique” case but also a microcosm through which emerging trends of urban development can be examined.

The Urban Age and the rise of the urban solutions industry

The Urban Age and urban solutionism

In 2005, the Urban Age was announced as a research project of the London School of Economics—heralding an era in which the planet would become majority urban for the first time in history (Burdett, 2006). Economists such as Glaeser (2012) articulated a “triumph of the city,” as the world’s “superstar cities” became magnets for talent, innovation, and economic dynamism. In the Global South, the expansion of cities was seen as a driving force for global growth. Much of the global business and political elite accepted and endorsed the world’s inexorable urbanization as a fait accompli. Amidst sclerosis of national politics in many advanced democracies and the failure of international negotiations to prevent climate change, cities have been seen as the best hope to tackle pressing global challenges by acting locally (Schragger, 2018). City networks emerged to share expertise and policies between cities, including C20 Cities, Rockefeller 100 Resilient Cities, and the ASEAN Smart Cities Network. Whereas urbanization had previously been seen as a contributor to environmental problems, discourse shifted toward viewing cities as solutions for environmental crises, with research showing benefits of urban density like greater transit use and reduced CO₂ emissions (Angelo and Wachsmuth, 2020). Infrastructure became an imagined solution for a range of social and economic problems (Glass and Addie, 2025). Meanwhile, scholarship informed by the perspectives of science and technology studies challenged this urban and infrastructural solutionism, noting how infrastructural solutions often reinforce existing class and social divides (Ramachandran et al., 2025).

The advent of the “urban age” has been accompanied by the rise of an entire industry known as “urban solutions.” The migration of millions of people into cities creates business opportunities in infrastructure, telecommunications and smart cities, energy, transport, and “green” technologies like renewable energy, smart grids, and green buildings. While there is no universally agreed upon definition of “urban solutions,” the term has gained currency as an umbrella for the whole suite of urban systems. Bok (2024: 14) claims that:

What unites the actors, organizations, and institutions of the urban solutions industry … is a largely unquestioned faith in the prospect that solutions can and should be rolled out to cities, an underlying assumption that cities will benefit from receiving these solutions.

The urban solutions industry encompasses “large private-sector firms in archi-tecture and planning, technology, and engineering, and large philanthropic foundations” (Bok, 2024: 14). Examples of specialized consulting firms include Bloomberg Associates and Google’s former Sidewalk Labs, which promote themselves as being in the “cities solutions” business. Management consulting firms like McKinsey and BCG developed their own “cities” practices (Vogelpohl and Klemp, 2018). Other companies with an explicit “urban solutions” business line include the American engineering and construction firm Fluor and the ride-hailing app Lyft.² Global conferences are organized where mayors and companies network and where companies sell technologies to cities, such as Singapore’s World Cities Summit and Bloomberg CityLab.

Urban solutions such as “smart cities” technologies have been critiqued for their associations with neoliberal policies driven by supranational organizations or multinational corporations (Hollands, 2015; Sadowski and Bendor, 2019). Yet, urban solutions are not placeless—they are developed and incubated in specific contexts. Few other polities have embraced the “urban solutions” industry as heartily as Singapore. In the early 1990s, Singapore issued a national digital strategy known as “Intelligent Island” (Sandfort, 1993) that aimed to build an island-wide digital infrastructure system, predating the global “smart cities” trend by around 18 years.³ Singapore launched the “Smart Nation” program in 2014, aiming to further digitize government, physical infrastructure, and payment systems.⁴ Singapore also began promoting “urban solutions” as an umbrella term for urban technological systems, building and engineering services, infrastructure, and city planning. The Centre for Liveable Cities, a think tank under the Ministry of National Development, has been a key promoter of Singapore’s urban planning expertise, even starting a periodical entitled Urban Solutions in 2012. Government agencies like the Economic Development Board and Enterprise Singapore⁵ promote the industry as a key priority for the country’s development. The Centre for Liveable Cities hosts the World Cities Summit and awards the Lee Kuan Yew World City Prize to “facilitate the sharing of best practices in urban solutions that are easily replicable across cities.”

Showcase urbanism and global urban imaginaries

The race to embrace advanced “urban solutions,” particularly in the Global South, has been partly driven by efforts to transform how nations and cities are seen in the global imagination, with the goal of attracting investment and tourism. As science and technology studies scholars Jasanoff and Kim (2015: 6) have argued, “sociotechnical imaginaries are collectively held, institutionally stabilized, and publicly performed visions of desirable futures, animated by shared understandings of social life and order, and attainable through advances in science and technology.” Phelps (2021: 4) has argued that planning is “an activity of imagination, with a stock of wisdom and an array of useful methods for making decisions and getting things done.” Nations and citizens undertake urban planning as an act of imagination to build desirable futures, but imaginaries are also directed outward—with the aim of influencing how the rest of the world views particular places. Cities have long curated their “image” (Vale and Warner, 2001). Acuto (2022) shows how cities (with cases drawn from Sydney, Dubai, and Singapore) undertake efforts to become “global”—often by constructing world-class infrastructure and megaprojects that transform how cities are viewed in the global imagination. Singapore’s contributions to the development of urban solutions both reinforced its unique identity while also helping to construct the global urban solutions industry of which it is a key node.

Many cities have tried to transform their “image” through urban redevelopment and gentrification. Ghertner (2015) describes New Delhi’s redevelopment as “rule by aesthetics,” where concerns over appearance dictate the demolition of slums and the regulation of informal housing. Cities have also turned to megaprojects and special economic zones to attract investment and transform their global image. Rapidly urbanizing cities across the Global South have embraced a speculative form of development driven by megaprojects and real-estate development (Chu and He, 2022; Leitner and Sheppard, 2023; Shatkin, 2017). China built special economic zones like Shenzhen or Shanghai’s Pudong to attract foreign investment in the early years of its Reform and Opening period. Saudi Arabia’s Neom Plan for a massive linear city in the desert is a bold effort by Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman to attract investment to the kingdom (Aly, 2019). Visibility among domestic constituents can also be a motivation for what López-García and Heathcott (2024) term “showcase politics” in their analysis of government-led park projects in Mexico City. Many cities around the world have built urban exhibition halls—curated spaces often housing miniature physical or digital models where state- or elite-led visions of the urban are performed and endorsed for public reception (Jones, 2015). Fan (2015: 2893) describes how urban exhibition halls in China “prepare the mass audience for its grand future vision, legitimate government plans for (re)development, present the edited local history, promote/glorify the mega events/projects, [and] spread particular propaganda to manipulate citizen participation.” Writing of Singapore’s City Gallery, which includes a model of current and planned new areas of Singapore, Glass (2018) describes it as a place where state sovereignty is performed, and the state’s planning actions are justified to its citizenry. The idea of showcasing and performativity in the limited space of the exhibition or museum can be seen as a form of “showcase urbanism.”

Cities in the Global South once transformed their image in line with Western urban models. Today, cities increasingly look beyond the West for references of progress and modernity (Parnell and Robinson, 2012; Roy, 2009; Roy and Ong, 2011). Singapore has become one such reference point for advanced urban planning, particularly in Asia and the developing world. Singapore has become a truth spot for the formation of urban planning expertise. Gieryn (2006: 7) notes how truth spots function as “a place that people associate with credible, authoritative knowledge.” The development of the urban solutions sector in Singapore is an outgrowth of the country’s successful efforts to attract foreign investment as it transformed from colonial entrepot into a global city and regional finance and business hub. The state beautified the environment to attract tourists and foreign investment (Lee, 2000; Yuen, 1996), and as Kong and Yeoh (2003) have argued, the construction of built and natural landscapes has always been a deeply political project in Singapore, enmeshed in questions of historic memory, state power, and race relations. The display of technologies in urban environments has emerged as a useful tool for constructing and disseminating Singapore’s current urban imaginary. The promotion of the “urban solutions” industry reinforces Singapore as a “truth spot” of urban development knowledge, among its own citizens and in the global imagination.

From testbed urbanism to the city as showroom

This article argues that Singapore’s current efforts to display urban technologies go beyond self-contained showrooms to encompass the entire physical space of the city, with its built and natural landscapes. Even as these technologies are promoted as solutions to improve Singapore’s livability, sustainability, or quality of life, the motivation of showcasing technology as a goal in itself is evident from discussions with various officials, engineers, and designers involved in these projects. In their analysis of the South Korean “smart city” of Songdo, Halpern et al. (2013) call the project an example of “testbed urbanism” in which entire urban environments are constructed as experimental platforms for testing new technologies, governance models, and social arrangements. Songdo trialed ubiquitous video screens, provided by US-based IT firm Cisco, and futuristic pneumatic tubes for waste disposal. Yet, Songdo is generally seen as having failed to live up to its hype—with slow population growth and hardware that quickly became outdated, such as Cisco’s teleconferencing screens in apartments. Other smart-city projects driven by multinationals failed even more completely, including Google’s effort to build a digital district from the ground up in Toronto, which collapsed after citizen-driven backlash (Goodman and Powles, 2019; O’Kane, 2022).

In Singapore, however, there is greater coordination between state economic policies, technology testing, and urban design and planning. Producing knowledge of urban technologies for export, as in Singapore’s urban solutions industry, depends both on test-bedding and on visibility. Singapore’s efforts to display its homegrown urban solutions also contain a paradox: while its companies aim to export various urban solutions abroad, the state has an interest in reproducing Singapore’s status as the “truth spot” of urban planning knowledge. Urban showrooms embody these overlapping priorities of emphasizing Singapore’s unique qualities while also demonstrating the utility of solutions that could be adopted by customers around the world. The audiences and purposes of showrooms discussed in this article also vary in their aims and audiences—from highly visible outward-facing spaces like Changi Airport and Gardens by the Bay to the more enterprise-focused Jurong Innovation District and Punggol Digital District.

Singapore’s need to reproduce itself as a model of urban solutions has led to a phenomenon I characterize in this article as the “city as showroom” — whereby the planning and design of entire districts is increasingly informed by a need to embed and display urban solutions technologies in situ within specific areas of the city. This includes iconic tourist sites like Gardens by the Bay, as well as new industrial districts developed to showcase technologies like cybersecurity and advanced manufacturing, and in technologies deployed across the entire island such as the Smart Lamppost project. Depending on the audience and the aims of specific stakeholders, showrooms are found in iconic outward-oriented locations like Gardens by the Bay, as well as in the business-oriented districts such as Jurong Innovation and Punggol Digital District. The “city as showroom” as articulated in this article resembles other notions as “testbed urbanism” and “showcase urbanism” but it is distinguished by its combination of both iconic outward-facing urban environments and more inward-oriented forms of technology test-bedding (see Figure 1).

Figure 1.

Key features of showcase urbanism, testbed urbanism, and the city as showroom.

Spinning off the state: The institutional origins of Singapore’s “urban solutions” industry

This section examines how Singapore’s urban solutions industry evolved from a primarily government-led effort into a broader commercial industry shaped by collaboration between firms and state agencies. A sense of threat and urgency has pervaded Singapore’s approach to development, beginning with its eviction from Malaysia and independence in 1965 (Lee, 2000). As a small city state with few natural resources, Singapore embraced the world market. Initially, it focused on attracting foreign investment to jumpstart industrialization. Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew promoted the physical transformation of the island, such as planting trees and building Singapore into a “garden city,” justified to help attract foreign visitors and investment (Kong and Yeoh, 2003). The Land Acquisition Act of 1966 paved the way for extensive government-led slum clearance and construction of public housing through the Housing Development Board (HDB). Provision of public housing and new towns was a form of social engineering as well as social insurance that helped compensate for the People’s Action Party’s otherwise pro-business policies (Centre for Liveable Cities, National Parks Board, and Cengage Learning, 2013). By the 1980s, Singapore’s urban planning achievements and economic success had become more evident, spurring interest in its policies.

In the 1990s, government agencies leveraged Singapore’s reputation to export Singaporean expertise. China’s Deng Xiaoping toured Singapore in the early 1990s and was impressed by its “social order” (Richardson, 1994), laying the foundation for the China–Singapore Suzhou Industrial Park⁶ begun in 1994 and later, the Sino-Singapore Tianjin Eco City begun in 2007. Roy and Ong (2011: 14) describe these projects as a process of “Asian inter-referencing” and “modeling,” “a set of normative and technical urban plans [that] have come to inspire city innovation projects across Asia and beyond.” Chua (2011: 36) describes how, in this process, “the entire Singapore story is disaggregated or disassembled into a set of analytically and heuristically unrelated discrete practices, and each can be dispersed across space and time in Asia and beyond.” In this process, successful elements of Singapore’s urban planning such as HDB-built public housing or its “garden city” image are distilled and re-assembled for re-export. Early projects abroad like the China–Singapore Suzhou Industrial Park were largely government-to-government coordinated through the Ministry of National Development (Centre for Liveable Cities, Singapore, 2016).

Singapore has long promoted innovation within government agencies and tried to retain technical expertise in government, what Miao and Phelps (2019) call “intrapreneurialism.” Building up institutional capacity was a goal of computerization projects such as the Intelligent Island in 1992 as well as recent initiatives like the “Smart Nation” program (Woods et al., 2024). Yet, because of Singapore’s small size, reaching outward to the global market has been a strategic imperative and economic necessity for Singaporean firms. Singapore’s urban expertise increasingly became an export commodity (Pow, 2014). Restructuring government agencies allowed them to hive off expertise into profit-oriented firms known as “government-linked companies” (GLCs) that pursue commercial contracts abroad. Many of these entities are owned by Temasek, one of Singapore’s two sovereign wealth funds created in 1974.⁷ Jurong Town Corporation (JTC) was created as a statutory board in 1967 to develop and manage the Jurong Industrial Estate and many other industrial and commercial properties. In 2001, JTC started a subsidiary Jurong International Holdings, focusing on providing master planning and engineering expertise (Surbana, n.d.). In 2003, the building and development division of the HDB was separated and corporatized as HDBCorp, subsequently acquired by Temasek and rebranded as Surbana. In 2015, Surbana was integrated with Jurong International Holdings and rebranded as Surbana Jurong. Changi Airport was corporatized in 2009 as Changi Airport Group. This has enabled the group to enter the business of developing and operating airports around the world (Bok, 2015).

In addition to those companies “spun off” from state agencies, several Singaporean GLCs developed their capacity and expertise through decades-long partnerships with Singaporean agencies. One example is ST Engineering, originally a defense contractor, that works closely with the Land Transport Authority. ST developed its “urban solutions” business line, leveraging Singapore’s reputation in city planning to sell commercial solutions abroad, such as the Smart Lamppost project. Other examples of global Singaporean firms include CapitaLand a developer with extensive holdings of malls and properties in China and Southeast Asia; and Sembcorp, a conglomerate with interests in energy and real estate such as industrial parks in Vietnam. These entities capitalize on the urban planning reputation of Singapore to market solutions worldwide, particularly in the developing world.

The city as showroom

Singapore must reproduce itself as a model to sustain its business of exporting urban planning solutions—an imperative that requires a distinct form of “showroom urbanism” explored in this article. There are several districts and sites across Singapore that exemplify the “city as showroom,” including Gardens by the Bay, Changi Airport Jewel, Jurong Innovation District, Punggol Digital District, and the Smart Lamppost project (see Figure 2). In this article, I focus on three of these cases in greater detail: Gardens by the Bay, Jurong Innovation District, and the Smart Lamppost project. In the previous section, I discussed how the partial commercialization of state expertise through GLCs allowed the state to leverage expertise in urban development, engineering, and planning into commercial projects. The outward orientation of GLCs, combined with their access to Singaporean state backing, is an impetus for the display of technologies in situ within the city, as such showcases help Singaporean companies market their expertise abroad. To be sure, the showrooms discussed in this section have varying purposes and audiences (see Figure 2). Gardens by the Bay is the most iconic: a showroom for Singapore’s national brand, experimental technology of local startups, and the Smart Nation initiative. JTC’s industrial sites help attract foreign investment while showcasing expertise in cybersecurity (Punggol), and future manufacturing (Jurong Innovation District). Changi Airport, corporatized in 2009, also reinforces the airport’s global reputation through new projects like the Jewel. Companies like ST Engineering use state-backed projects like the Smart Lamppost to showcase their technology to potential buyers abroad.

Figure 2.

Map of showroom projects in Singapore.

Gardens by the Bay: Showroom for flora and environmental technology

Gardens by the Bay opened in 2012 and quickly became an iconic tourist destination for the city and an anchor of the new Marina Bay District adjacent to the city’s CBD. The idea for Gardens by the Bay emerged from the leadership of Kiat W Tan, the former director of NParks, an agency that manages Singapore’s green spaces. Gardens by the Bay operates as a “public company limited by guarantee” but is designated to manage the area under its control. It generates revenue from selling tickets for the Supertrees and glass conservatories, and hosts events (Gardens by the Bay, 2024). Gardens by the Bay reinforces and innovates upon Singapore’s longstanding identity as a “city in a garden.” In his early years as Prime Minister, Lee Kuan Yew made beautification of the physical landscape a key part of his strategy for economic development. Today, Gardens by the Bay is not only a tourist attraction and symbol of Singapore but also a showroom for new technologies of Singapore’s “urban solutions industry.” Whereas the colonial-era Botanic Gardens showcased new plants the British hoped to cultivate for economic production across their colonies in Southeast Asia, today Gardens by the Bay showcases new green technologies being developed as part of Singapore’s push to become a “smart nation.” Gardens by the Bay is the most iconic but not the only such showroom within Singapore (Figure 3).

Figure 3.

Gardens by the Bay (Author, 2023).

A landscape architect who works for Gardens by the Bay drove me in a golf cart through the “behind-the-scenes” operations center, which includes underground staging areas beneath the two glass superdomes and the biomass electricity generation facility. She described a variety of new initiatives to trial technology in the garden, including a pilot project to deploy sensors that can monitor tree tilt—each sensor costs around US$300 and the data can be aggregated to provide a picture of overall tree health across the gardens (Interview, Gardens by the Bay, 2023). Gardens by the Bay had just signed a contract with a local solar panel company to cover the horizontal surfaces of the gardens, such as greenhouses, with photovoltaic solar panels to generate electricity, and another with a small local startup company operating drones to inspect the functioning of the high-tech Supertrees and the health of actual trees. “Big companies like Keppel give us money, but smaller startups want to be associated with our name. For example, we’ve used drones in our irrigation system and pest detection from a small company doing horticultural tech,” according to the landscape architect:

It’s a two-fold thing, we get free or low-cost technology and they can tell potential clients they are reputable, we worked with Gardens by the Bay. Singaporean startups want to work with us so they can say “we deployed our technology in Gardens by the Bay,” and we get some experimental technology for very low cost. (Interview, Gardens by the Bay, 2023)

Gardens by the Bay is a showcase for Singaporean state efforts as well as smaller companies looking to establish their reputation. An “ad-hoc” committee of various experts within the Gardens by the Bay organization brings together architects, horticulturists, and technologists to recommend new innovations for the Gardens. The landscape architect noted that her boss tasked her to find technologies that could be displayed in the new “Founder’s Garden,” a memorial to Singapore’s founding leaders.

Gardens by the Bay was chosen as a site for one of the showcase projects of Smart Nation, an initiative begun in 2014 by Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong to develop new digital government initiatives across agencies and across the island. One project of Smart Nation was the Smart Nation Sensor Platform, which deployed sensors across Singapore to collect data for government agencies. One of the showcases for the Smart Nation Sensor Platform was the “Smart Garden” project. According to a project engineer, the project began in 2020 with a grant from the Smart Nation Fund and the Ministry of National Development, which oversees Gardens by the Bay:

[Smart Nation Group] came up with it initially, there’s probably a mandate to work on smart lighting or smart systems, and there was an opportunity to use Gardens by the Bay as a test site for new technologies. (Interview, software engineer, GovTech, 2023)

The idea was to deploy a variety of sensors to measure things like nitrate levels in the gardens to minimize algae blooms caused by overfertilization, measure visitor levels, and deploy lights that would automatically turn on and off when visitors approach, which could save up to 40% in energy usage. According to an engineer from GovTech who worked on the project, they developed a “middleware” platform to manage data from the myriad types of Internet of Things (IoT) devices that might be deployed across the site:

We’re working with the agencies like Gardens by the Bay or NParks⁸ to build up applications with them, it’s a bit of a hand-holding project really. A lot of the use cases for using IoT devices in horticulture haven’t been defined yet.

Smart Gardens in Singapore’s iconic Gardens by the Bay is a “showroom” project, building on the city’s identity as a city in a garden to demonstrate the integration of digital technology in natural environments. Yet, even a director with the Smart Nation Group expressed skepticism about the utility of the technology deployed: “I feel like the project was a bit tech-led, it wasn’t designed that way, but that’s how it's evolved” (Interview, Smart Nation, 2023). He noted that NParks, the agency that manages Singapore’s green spaces, has gone further in their projects island-wide. The Smart Gardens Project served primarily as a showcase to demonstrate the application of IoT technology in natural environments. The implicit criticism of the project as “tech led” suggests that many of the technology pilots for Gardens by the Bay were driven by a need to showcase technology rather than to solve an urgent problem. Gardens by the Bay has served as a showroom for local startups seeking to test or experiment with technology and to use the reputation of Gardens by the Bay to sell their products outside of Singapore. It has also served as a showroom for projects of the Smart Nation initiative, a nationwide push for smart technology managed under the Prime Minister’s office.

Jurong Innovation District: The future of manufacturing and building technologies

The Jurong Innovation District (JID), a project of JTC, illustrates how corporatized state entities (Surbana Jurong, JTC) leverage state backing and operate as commercial firms—an outcome of the “spinning off the state” dynamic discussed earlier.” The Jurong Industrial Estate played a key role in Singapore’s early industrialization following its separation from Malaysia in 1965. In 2008, Singapore’s Urban Redevelopment Authority planned for a new Clean Tech Park in Jurong to “position Singapore as a global testbed for early adoption of clean technology products and solutions for urbanized settings in the tropics” (Hatuka and Ben-Joseph, 2022: 121). In 2016, Finance Minister Heng Swee Keat announced the creation of “600-hectare Jurong Innovation District” that aims to showcase futuristic “Industry 4.0” manufacturing technologies where “highly skilled staff work seamlessly alongside robots” (JTC, 2016). The district is adjacent to Nanyang Technological University and has already attracted foreign companies such as Hyundai, Bosch, and Siemens. Jurong thus builds on the industrial legacy of the Jurong Industrial Complex, Singapore’s largest industrial area, to promote Singapore as a leader in advanced high-tech manufacturing, even as the city has lost much of its labor-intensive manufacturing to cheaper labor markets in the region. Jurong is positioned as a showroom—not only for Singapore but also for companies choosing to locate there. The factories in Jurong are not sites of mass production but rather serve as testbeds and showrooms for technology that companies can then scale elsewhere. As a manager for JTC tells me:

Singapore is very selective in terms of the type of manufacturing because we want higher value. Hyundai is doing assembly for electric vehicles, they want to trial new technology here, but it doesn’t make a lot of sense to build a full car manufacturing plant here. (Interview, Clean Tech Park, 2023)

Thus, the logic of the “city as showroom” extends also to individual factories recruited to the area—to be showrooms of advanced production. A related JID initiative is the Global Technology Innovation Village, which aims to use the district as a “platform for Singapore to share its knowledge and expertise in advanced manufacturing with regional government and business leaders” (SkillsFuture Singapore, 2020).

Another component of JID is a new headquarters for Surbana Jurong, the planning/design firm that was spun off from HDB and JTC. The campus is designed by architect Moshe Safdie, who also designed the iconic Marina Bay Sands and Changi Jewel. The campus demonstrates new technologies like prefabricated systems, energy-efficient materials, and Building Information Management construction. The CEO of Surbana Jurong notes, “the Surbana Jurong Campus will be a showcase of how we can support our clients” (Surbana Jurong, 2019). The site will help “trial urban solutions” before implementation in other projects, reinforcing the role of the campus itself as a testbed of urban design ideas (Straits Times, 2019). The campus is a “living showcase of the group’s smart and sustainable solutions for a better future” (Surbana Jurong, 2024). Surbana is Singapore’s leading planning, engineering, and design firm, and the campus is a showroom for Singaporean urban solutions expertise. Finally, JID has also served as an important showcase for the leadership of JTC. In the words of a former Singaporean planner:

JID is like JTC’s baby, it’s a big showcase, it’s really an agency proving it is progressive and innovative, so it becomes personal, it’s not as much about the agency’s technical expertise, but it reflects on the agency’s senior management how innovative or progressive they can be. (Interview, former LTA employee, 2023)

The case of Smart Lampposts and ST Engineering

The final case is different from the previous two because it is not a single district in Singapore but rather a technology that was deployed across the entire country and then later exported. ST Engineering began in 1967 as a state-owned munitions manufacturer and is today a world-leading defense technology and systems integrator firm. It has also become one of Singapore’s leading purveyors of “urban solutions.” ST’s Urban Solutions Business has four main verticals: road, rail, smart utilities and infrastructure, and mobility services. This includes its AGIL suite of smart-city and IoT solutions, including the AGIL Dashboard for managing IoT devices and the AGIL Smart Lamppost (ST Engineering, 2022). Singapore’s Smart Lamppost project was a test project of the Smart Nation Sensor Platform. Smart Nation would “leverage the LTA’s existing lamppost infrastructure to explore deploying other sensors transmitting environmental data such as temperature and humidity” (Tan and Zhou, 2018: 95).

The Smart Lamppost failed to gain traction in Singapore largely due to its cost and the lack of demand from the diverse needs of the agencies it was intended to serve. According to an engineer with GovTech:

The demand for sensors was quite low and not that even across the board. Only specific agencies. It didn’t make that much sense to provide the same system for different agency needs. It was hard to tell at the time if this idea would pan out. Over the years there was a realization there could be a more flexible way of doing this. Mobile posts seem to work better. (Interview, GovTech, 2023)

Another GovTech employee put it more bluntly, telling me that “the Smart Lamppost project is almost like a taboo now in Singapore, we don’t talk about it” (Interview, GovTech, 2023). In 2023, the Smart Lamppost project was formally ended by Jacqueline Poh, then CEO of GovTech.

But for technology vendor ST, this was not the end of the road. An engineer who worked with ST’s Urban Solutions division told me that:

System integrators like ST try to establish a showcase in their home market. Although the Smart Lamppost didn't take off in Singapore it did elsewhere. We got lucky overseas [with the Smart Lampposts]. Other things did not take off here or elsewhere. Brazil has become a large market for ST's smart lighting solutions. ST has a close working relationship with Singapore's Land Transport Authority (LTA).. ST has been working with LTA for decades, we develop a lot of technologies for LTA and we eventually sell overseas; like a project for traffic management for all of Abu Dhabi. (Interview, engineer, ST Engineering, 2023)

Projects like the Smart Lamppost can serve as showcases for pre-tested technologies that are then exported and sold abroad by state-owned commercial firms. Close cooperation and circulation of employees and executives between LTA and ST, and ST’s contracts with LTA exemplify close collaboration between state agencies and GLCs. ST has long worked closely with Singapore’s LTA and the former CEO of the LTA is currently the head of ST’s Urban Solutions business line.

Discussion

The concept of the “city as showroom” does not posit a universal logic applying to all cities. The cases in this article were chosen because of their direct relevance to the phenomenon. Even in these places, the need to reproduce and display urban expertise is not the sole motive for urban development projects. However, the logic of showrooming urban expertise is salient in the cases because Singapore has explicitly made the urban solutions industry an economic priority. The role of the state in promoting the “city as showroom” is especially salient in Singapore, given the extensive coordination between economic development and spatial planning. The logic of showcasing described here is a unique outgrowth of the close connection between state planning agencies and commercially oriented firms. State-owned enterprises use physical urban space to demonstrate their proprietary technologies, enabled by unique spatial and institutional arrangements in Singapore—where the state owns most urban land—an example of what Shatkin (2014) termed “planning under state capitalism.”

The aims and motivations of “the city as showroom” are variegated (see Table 1). Some of the cases in this article function as showcases for national efforts (Smart Nation Initiative’s Smart Garden project in Gardens by the Bay, or JTC’s digital twin Open Digital Platform at Punggol Digital District). Smaller startups use the visibility of Gardens by the Bay to demonstrate their technologies to global audiences. Other projects help to showcase commercial firms: ST Engineering leveraged the Smart Lamppost project to demonstrate their technologies for export across the Global South. Surbana Jurong’s new campus in Jurong Innovation District is explicitly conceived as a showroom for the urban solutions they aim to offer around the world. Changi Jewel serves as a showroom for the country to arriving passengers, while also promoting Changi Airport Group and CapitaLand’s brands. Meanwhile, leaders of agencies in Singapore advance their own political careers through showroom projects that demonstrate their agencies’ commitment to innovation in advanced technologies.

Table 1.

Cases of the city as showroom.

Case	Sectors	Company/agency	Showroom functions
Gardens by the Bay	Sustainable solutions(green tech),energy systems	Smart Nation	Showroom for SmartNation projectShowroom for startupsto gain recognition
Jurong Innovation District	Advanced manufacturing	JTC, Hyundai	Showroom of futuremanufacturing
Punggol Digital District	Cybersecurity anddigital systems	JTC	Showroom for JTCdigital twin (ODP)
Smart Lamppost project	Sensor technology,smart city,transportation	ST Engineering	Showroom forSmart NationShowroom for STEngineering SmartLampposts
Changi Airport Jewel	Aviation, retail,green building	Changi AirportGroup,Capitaland	High-profile touristattraction for internationalvisitors, showroom forgreen building technology

There are other national contexts in which the state is closely engaged in the promotion of “urban solutions” such as smart-city-related tech or other types of infrastructure. Such contexts may be ideal places to look for the emergence of similar forms of “showroom urbanism.” These include South Korea, which has promoted smart-city projects abroad as part of coordination with its domestic IT firms (Miao et al., 2024). China has exported its infrastructure through its Belt and Road Initiative. Just outside Beijing, the Xiong'an New Area is being developed into a showroom of Chinese infrastructural expertise in clean energy, engineering, and smart cities (Stokols, 2025). Outside Asia, the Netherlands has used its expertise in hydrological engineering to promote urban solutions for climate adaptation (Kruijf, 2013). Further research could compare and analyze how the showcasing of urban solutions and other technologies increasingly shapes urban and infrastructural development across other geographies.

City branding and transformation of a city’s image has been a common tool to transform how cities are viewed in the global urban imagination. Similarly, the rise of smart cities and other techno-solutionist fantasies of urban development have given rise to the urban solutions industry worldwide. This article shows how “urban solutions” as a global industry have not simply been imposed from multinational corporations or international organizations but have been shaped by states like Singapore and strongly influenced by their respective cultural and institutional logics. This article developed the concept of the “city as showroom,” which posits that because of the need to display urban technologies in situ within urban environments, the entire city collectively becomes a showroom for emerging technologies. This strategic display of technology across the city helps reproduce Singapore’s status as a truth spot of advanced urban planning.

Conclusions

New urban districts in Singapore exemplify an emergent logic of urban development that prioritizes the display and showcasing of urban solutions. With the rise of the “urban age” as a discursive frame promoted by development organizations, corporations, and cities themselves, city services and infrastructures have been transformed into an emergent global urban solutions industry. The article first discussed how urban solutions evolved as a key industry in Singapore, with origins in government-to-government collaborations to export Singapore’s model abroad, followed by commercialization of state expertise via the creation of GLCs—what I term “spinning off the state.” While Singapore’s role as an exporter of models and solutions has been well documented, the impact that this imperative to reproduce urban expertise has on the contemporary planning of Singapore has not been examined previously. This article contributes toward an understanding of the burgeoning urban solutions industry and its spatial and urban implications. The article argues that because of the impact that exporting urban planning expertise has on a city’s or nation’s image and economic development, the spatial planning of districts in Singapore is increasingly informed by the need to reproduce the city’s leading edge in urban solutions by showcasing advanced technologies within iconic areas and greenfield districts. Theoretically, the “city as showroom” is distinguished from longstanding efforts by cities to curate their image through visually iconic showcase projects, and more recent efforts to “testbed” new technologies like smart-city infrastructures. In Singapore, the imperative to test and export urban solutions has led to a more outward-oriented form of technology deployment in visible districts and showcase projects across the entire city.

The phenomenon of city districts as showrooms for the urban solutions industry is still nascent, but some initial implications may be drawn from cases in Singapore. First, the coordination of urban technology development and spatial planning leads to purposeful display of technologies in urban environments. One benefit of this state- and GLC-led approach vis-à-vis private-sector smart cities is that alignment between spatial planning and technology deployment may mitigate coordination or governance challenges. For example, Google’s Sidewalk Labs in Toronto lacked the state capacity and civic trust to deploy its experimental technologies even within the delimited area of Toronto Waterfront. At the same time, the need for showrooms tends to privilege hard tech that is visible and potentially lucrative at the expense of cheaper or more flexible solutions. Across many of the projects discussed, informants often spoke of efforts failing to take hold or deliver value due to being “tech-led”. For example, the usefulness of sensors deployed in Gardens by the Bay was doubted, even by those within the government agency working on the project. If the imperative of showcasing emergent technologies takes precedence over a clear need for specific solutions to improve urban life (i.e. residential well-being, equity), showcase projects may end up failing to deliver on promises of improving urban life even though this is often what they claim to do. In such instances, citizens may question why public resources are lavished on expensive technologies that deliver few tangible benefits. Meanwhile, profits accrue to companies selling solutions elsewhere. Residents in areas developed as showrooms are effectively mobilized as “experimental urban subjects” for economic development goals of state agencies and the profit motives of urban solutions firms.

Singapore exemplifies a new form of urbanism in which the entire city itself becomes a showroom for urban solutions. Unlike earlier logics of city branding or testbed experimentation, showroom urbanism links the spatial planning of districts directly to the commercial imperatives of state-linked firms and the reproduction of Singapore as a truth spot of urban expertise. The cases of Gardens by the Bay, Jurong Innovation District, and the Smart Lamppost project demonstrate how urban space is mobilized not only as infrastructure but also as a sales floor and marketing platform—an environment where technologies are valued for their visibility as much as their utility. A potential drawback of this approach is that it risks prioritizing superficial technologies over substantive improvements in urban life. As other cities and nations turn to similar strategies—whether in South Korea, China, or the Netherlands—Singapore’s showroom urbanism reveals both the promise and the pitfalls of treating the city as a stage for selling urban solutions.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to acknowledge funding from the Lynne Sagalyn and Gary Hack Fund for Dissertation Research, at MIT, which provided funding for fieldwork that this article draws on.

ORCID iD

Andrew Stokols

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

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The city as showroom: Singapore and the rise of the “urban solutions” industry

Abstract

Keywords

Introduction

Methods and case selection

The Urban Age and the rise of the urban solutions industry

The Urban Age and urban solutionism

Showcase urbanism and global urban imaginaries

From testbed urbanism to the city as showroom

Spinning off the state: The institutional origins of Singapore’s “urban solutions” industry

The city as showroom

Gardens by the Bay: Showroom for flora and environmental technology

Jurong Innovation District: The future of manufacturing and building technologies

The case of Smart Lampposts and ST Engineering

Discussion

Conclusions

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

ORCID iD

Funding

Declaration of conflicting interests

Notes

References