Singapore is a Southeast Asian city-state located off the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula with a population of around 5.6 million people. The economy of Singapore is highly developed and one of the most competitive in the world, with its GDP per capita estimated at US$55,000 in 2017. In terms of foreign relations, Singapore has strong ties to other countries in the region as well as other countries around the world. It is also a member of the United Nations, Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC). In terms of politics, Singapore has a parliamentary republic which includes two major parties: People’s Action Party (PAP) and Workers’ Party (WP). The Parliament consists of 89 members who are elected by popular vote every five years. In 2017, Lee Hsien Loong was prime minister and his PAP party held majority in parliamentary elections. See militarynous for Singapore military and defense.
Yearbook 2017
Singapore. According to Countryaah.com, 18-year-old blogger Amos Yee was granted political asylum in the United States in March when he was persecuted in Singapore for his political views, according to a US judge. Amos Yee has been in prison in Singapore twice for four and six weeks respectively in 2015 and 2016. According to the Interior Ministry, he was sentenced because of his comments against Muslims and Christians. His case sparked debate during the trials as to where the boundary of censorship and freedom of speech goes. See ABBREVIATIONFINDER for frequently used acronyms and abbreviations related to as well as country profile of Singapore.
In July, the Department of Defense announced that Singapore would provide the Philippines with military support in the fight against terrorism, after a militant group with links to the terrorist group IS in May entered the city of Marawi in the Philippines. The invasion worried governments in the region who stated that IS is trying to establish a base in southeast Asia.
In September, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong visited China’s counterpart Li Keqiang in Beijing. The meeting discussed, among other things, the South China Sea, as China was worried that their actions in the region will be confronted next year when Singapore takes over the chairmanship of the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN), according to sources at the Reuters news agency. The issue of Taiwan’s sensitive China was further raised. Tensions between China and Singapore increased in November last year when China seized nine Singaporean military vehicles that were about to be shipped back from a training ground in Taiwan.
Architecture. – The history of the island on which Singapore stands, located as it is at the southern end of the Malay peninsula, in a very favorable situation for maritime trade, dates back to ancient times, but the city was founded only in 1819 by the English East India Company. The urban center maintained the character of a traditional Asian colonial city until the 1950s, when English architects who worked in the colony and local designers who had studied in England began to modify its appearance in a modern sense, creating buildings that united to the characters of the International Style vernacular references to Chinese architecture. Only from its full independence, in 1965, has Singapore changed from a colonial outpost into a financial and commercial center of the first rank;2). This has led on the one hand to the severe erosion of the natural environment, to the point that since 1991 programs for the recovery of new soil from the sea have been underway, on the other hand the increase in height of the building, following which the image of the urban center becomes more and more similar to that of an American city.
A leading role in urban planning and in the design of public works, in these years of great development and transformation, has been played directly by government agencies. The activity of the Housing Development Board was significant(HDB), established as early as 1960, whose direct responsibilities include the design of new residential districts and major public housing complexes, in which highly advanced construction technologies are often used. Already in the early 1980s, thanks to the building programs conducted by the HDB, 70% of the population lived in public housing, and this percentage increased in the following years when in Singapore, and in the new satellite cities that surround the urban center on the island. main, the public housing stock has reached half a million apartments. In the second half of the 1980s, efforts were made to improve the quality of individual residential districts, through a greater variety of typologies (to the omnipresent tower houses, in the satellite cities of Pasir Ris and Bishan, low-rise residential blocks were interspersed), the landscape modeling of the site, the greater characterization of the neighborhood centers. In this context, the HDB has also designed many of the new religious centers in the city; among the most notable a series of mosques, such as that of Daru Amal (1986), or the Siglap (1991) which embraces, including it, a smaller old mosque that occupied the place. The second government agency that has contributed to the definition of the urban scene is the like that of Daru Amal (1986), or the Siglap (1991) which embraces, including it, a smaller old mosque that occupied the place. The second government agency that has contributed to the definition of the urban scene is the like that of Daru Amal (1986), or the Siglap (1991) which embraces, including it, a smaller old mosque that occupied the place. The second government agency that has contributed to the definition of the urban scene is the Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA), created in 1974, with the task of taking care of the rehabilitation of the oldest buildings in the urban center and the conservation of a number of areas of the colonial city. Among the areas subjected to conservation by the URA it is worth mentioning that of Tanjong Pagar, where 221 house-shops have been recovered. The URA has also promoted private restoration interventions, as happened for the residential area of Emerald Hill, where many splendid historic villas have been expertly restored, for the Raffles Hotel (1991), a luxurious hotel originally opened in 1887 and restored from the Architects 61 studio, or for the old Immigration Office, located in the old colonial district of the city and transformed into a museum (1989), by the DP Architects group.
Government offices, equipped with a substantial technical staff, also coordinate the work of external professionals called upon to collaborate in the construction of major public works. Among these we should mention the metropolitan transport system (Mass rapid transit), completed in the period 1986-89, which constituted a field of application of the most recent experimentation in architecture. Among the most interesting works is the group of seven stations, each of which is identified by a high arched roof made of prestressed reinforced concrete beams, designed by an international consortium that included the DP Architects studio of Singapore, the Swedish BSK Konsult, the English Halcrow Group Architectural Practice.