Urban expectations in a new world

I read through a friend's musings on city life, and wrote about what I felt.

Call it good timing, I suppose, but I'm now reading a book, City Life, that my colleague, Joyce, lent me some time back. It was written by Witold Rybczynski in 1995. (Joyce, be patient with me --- I'll finish it soon.)

He wrote about cities: how we live in them and how we use them, how cities develop their own identities, and how our urban spaces have been changed and affected by our lifestyles and landscapes through time.

There was this part that grabbed me:

"Most cities have places of which the visitor can say when he reaches them, "Now, I'm really here." These hallmark places can be famous monuments like Eiffel Tower and Berlin's Brandenburg Gate or even famous buildings like Buckingham Palace. More often than not, they are large public places: The Piazza San Marco in Venice, Red Square in Moscow, Tiananmen Square in Beijing."

I got to thinking about Singapore and whether we had anything that was unique and iconic. The closest I could come to was the Singapore Girl.

People might point to that durian of an Esplanade but to me, it's a recent thing. I was in search of something more historically significant or monumentally impressive but I couldn't think of any. The Sir Stamford Raffles statue?

Well, in future, we could well be known as the Monte Carlo of Asia. That's light years away from being the Antioch of the region.