Explore Singapore in Google Street View

Singapore is the most planned city you can explore virtually, and the planning is visible everywhere. Land is scarce, so almost every decision has been made deliberately: where housing goes, where industry goes, how much greenery is required, which shophouse rows are preserved and which blocks are cleared. The result at street level is a city with very few accidents in it, which is either impressive or slightly eerie depending on your taste.

Start with the shophouses. Chinatown, Little India and Kampong Glam all have long terraces of two and three storey shophouses, narrow-fronted with a covered walkway at ground level called a five-foot way. That walkway was a colonial building requirement and it is why you can walk these districts in shade. Each area has kept its own colour scheme, and the terraces are among the most photogenic things in Southeast Asia.

Marina Bay is the set piece. Three hotel towers with a boat balanced on top, a museum shaped like a hand, a garden full of steel supertrees, and a bay that was created by damming a river mouth. It is an entirely artificial landscape, finished within the last twenty years, and it was captured on foot around the whole waterfront loop.

The Gardens by the Bay supertrees are worth a specific look. They are vertical gardens on steel frames, up to fifty metres tall, with a walkway strung between two of them. The walkway was captured, so you can cross it virtually and look down on the rest of the garden and out to the bay.

For everyday Singapore, look at the public housing. Around eighty percent of residents live in HDB flats, and the estates are their own districts with markets, hawker centres and schools. Tiong Bahru is the oldest and the most architecturally distinctive, with curved 1930s streamline blocks that look nothing like the towers that came later.

One thing that will strike you while exploring. There is greenery on almost every road, including the expressways, because the planting is mandated rather than incidental. Following any main road from the airport into town shows a deliberate corridor of trees the whole way, which was a policy decision taken decades ago and is now simply what the city looks like.