Singapore’s smart city stories usually open with the same postcard: Marina Bay Sands glowing over the bay, driverless trains gliding into spotless stations, cashless payments that work so smoothly you barely notice you are paying. It is a powerful image for governments and consultants who sell “smartness” as a frictionless future: efficient, safe, seamless.
But in Singapore’s Smart Nation project, the same infrastructures that promise hyper-efficiency also help to define what a “good” citizen looks like: cashless, trackable, responsive to nudges, trusting of data-driven governance, and ultimately compliant.
This is not a dystopian sci-fi city where drones scream at people in the streets. It is something subtler and therefore harder to contest: a politics of comfortable obedience, in which urban surveillance technologies and digital conveniences work together to make questioning feel unnecessary, even ungrateful.
From paper money to perfect data: cashless citizenship
One of the flagship ambitions of the Singapore Smart Nation agenda has been to turn the city into a laboratory for digital payments. The official narrative is familiar: going cashless is about efficiency, security, and economic modernisation. As scholars of digital payments in Singapore show, this shift is also about constructing the figure of the “digital citizen” – responsible, efficient and always already plugged into national progress.
In practical terms, it means that everyday life – from tapping in on public transport to buying kopi at the hawker centre – is increasingly routed through traceable, platform-mediated transactions. The city becomes a dense web of payment data in which residents are legible as consumers and as subjects of data-driven governance.
On paper, this is about convenience and anti-fraud measures. In practice, it produces a powerful soft norm: the “proper” citizen is the one who does not use cash, who has nothing to hide, who accepts that visibility to the state and to corporations is the price for seamless urban life. Opting out of this logic is not illegal, but it can feel suspicious or simply impractical.
This is where digital paternalism creeps in. The state frames digital payment infrastructures as necessary to protect citizens from fraud, crime or inefficiency, and to keep Singapore competitive. The trade-off between privacy and security is presented as already decided, folded into a narrative of national survival and modernity.
What gets lost in this storyline is that citizens are not simply “going digital” by choice; they are being ushered into infrastructures where the asymmetry of power over data – who collects it, who analyses it, who benefits – is profound.
Watching the corridor: CCTV and lateral surveillance
The image of Singapore’s smart city often highlights glamorous zones – the CBD skyline, Changi Airport, and autonomous vehicles. But the politics of surveillance are just as visible in more ordinary spaces, like the narrow corridors of Housing and Development Board (HDB) blocks where most Singaporeans live.
In recent years, rules have shifted so that HDB residents no longer need prior approval to install corridor-facing CCTV cameras in many cases, as long as they respect some basic privacy safeguards. On paper, corridor cameras are about deterring harassment, theft, and anti-social behaviour – problems that are very real in dense urban living.
The result, however, is a layered surveillance environment. Public CCTV systems watch void decks, lift lobbies and car parks in the name of security and public order. At the same time, residents themselves increasingly participate in what scholars call lateral surveillance: neighbours watching neighbours, capturing footage “just in case” it might one day be needed as evidence.
The corridor becomes a threshold space where everyday domestic life – deliveries, family visits, arguments, small acts of care and conflict – can be recorded, stored and circulated. Social media is full of HDB corridor clips: parcels going missing, shoes stolen, disputes over plants or noise. The camera promises safety, but it also transforms neighbourly relations into potential evidence trails, and conflict into content.
Crucially, this expanding field of visibility is rarely matched by an equally robust public conversation about data protection, power and consent. Who owns the footage? How long is it stored? What happens when recordings are misused, or when certain groups – migrant workers, young people hanging out, informal hawkers – find themselves over-represented as “suspicious” in these clips?
Here, surveillance and citizenship intersect. To be seen cooperating with CCTV – whether by installing one, sharing footage, or simply accepting the camera as part of the landscape – reads as a form of responsible citizenship. To question the expansion of cameras in public housing may appear, within dominant narratives, as being soft on crime or selfishly indifferent to neighbours’ safety.
Lampposts, platforms and the soft power of “smart” infrastructures
The story is similar at the scale of the street. Singapore’s now infamous “Lamppost-as-a-Platform” pilot proposed to turn tens of thousands of lampposts into sensor hubs, potentially including facial recognition capabilities to monitor crowds and support law enforcement. The project was framed as a technical upgrade: lampposts would help manage traffic, detect environmental changes and support anti-terror operations.
Following public concern and the emergence of alternative sensor options, plans for a large-scale network of smart lampposts were scaled back. Still, the pilot captured something crucial about algorithmic governance in Singapore: the willingness to embed surveillance capacities into everyday infrastructures and then present them as neutral, objective tools of urban management.
This is where smart city politics become especially visible. When the lamppost becomes a platform, the street is no longer just a space for walking or gathering. It is a site of continuous data extraction: bodies moving through space become inputs for models that predict traffic, crowd behaviour, or “anomalies”. These models are tightly controlled by state agencies and corporate partners, not by those whose behaviour is being monitored.
Advocates of digital authoritarianism in Asia often point to China’s social credit programmes or extensive camera networks as clear examples of data used for discipline. Singapore is different: it does not run an overt social credit system, and its government consistently stresses legality, technocratic competence and the protection of citizens’ interests.
Yet the underlying logic is related. Data-rich infrastructures create the possibility of governance through nudging: adjusting policies, transport routes, enforcement strategies or even public messaging based on behavioural patterns. Those patterns can then be linked, explicitly or implicitly, to ideas about what responsible, “pro-nation” behaviour looks like.
The politics here are not only about punishment; they are about reward. Reliable commuters, orderly crowds, and rule-abiding pedestrians become the measure of success. In that sense, the Singapore smart city is not just about efficiency. It is about producing a particular kind of civic behaviour that fits a narrative of unity, stability and economic competitiveness.
Digital paternalism and the myth of co-creation
If you read Smart Nation Singapore policy documents and promotional materials, you will find frequent references to “co-creating” digital services with citizens, listening to feedback and encouraging participation. Participation portals, online consultation exercises and hackathons are presented as signs that residents are invited to shape the country’s digital future.
The reality, as critical studies on smart city governance in Singapore suggest, is more constrained. Key decisions about infrastructures, data architectures and partnerships with private technology firms are made technocratically, with limited public deliberation.
Citizens are asked to “co-create” within frameworks that have largely been pre-defined: they can offer ideas on how to make apps more user-friendly, or how to improve service delivery, but they rarely have direct influence over the deeper questions. Who owns the data? Which algorithms will be used and audited? What forms of protest or refusal are possible within a heavily monitored urban environment?
This is digital paternalism at work. The state presents itself as a wise guardian that knows what level of digitalisation is necessary to keep Singapore competitive and safe. It reassures residents that safeguards exist, that privacy is taken seriously, and that any new form of urban surveillance will be “proportionate”. In exchange, it expects trust and compliance.
The language of national vulnerability – small country, limited resources, hostile regional environment – is frequently invoked to justify strong state control and to frame critical voices as potentially destabilising. This does not mean there is no debate in Singapore; civil society groups, academics and artists do raise questions about the social costs of hyper-digitalisation. But they do so in a landscape where legal and informal constraints on dissent are real.
The irony is that genuine digital democracy would require precisely what smart governance often sidelines: messy, time-consuming public argument about trade-offs, including uncomfortable conversations about inequality, discrimination and the risks of algorithmic decision-making.
Compliant citizenship without a social credit score
Comparisons between Singapore and China’s social credit experiments are common, often deployed lazily to suggest that any use of facial recognition or big data is automatically equivalent to authoritarian scoring. It is important to resist this flattening. Singapore’s model of digital governance is not a copy of Beijing’s: it has stronger legal frameworks, more transparent bureaucracies and a political culture that emphasises technocratic meritocracy rather than charismatic central leadership.
And yet, the concept of “compliant citizenship” helps to connect these apparently different forms of smart authoritarianism. As researcher A. Sobey argues, Singapore’s digital environment can “oblige freedom”: citizens are formally free to choose, but the infrastructures, incentives and discourses around them push strongly towards one set of behaviours.
In Singapore, there is no need for a single social credit score when so many small systems already shape how people move, pay, and access services. Transport cards record routes; mobile apps log entries to buildings; CCTV networks and potential facial recognition systems monitor crowds. Algorithmic governance does not have to shout to be effective; it simply has to become the default operating system of the city.
This vision of citizenship is deeply moralised. The “good” resident is not only law-abiding but also data-compliant: they install official apps, respond to government SMS alerts, use cashless options when possible, and participate politely in consultation exercises. Those who distrust these systems can easily be framed as paranoid, backward or selfishly undermining national progress.
Importantly, these dynamics do not affect everyone equally. Migrant workers, low-income residents, racialised communities and political dissidents are more likely to experience the sharp edges of data-driven policing and surveillance, from spot checks to targeted enforcement in public spaces. Yet their perspectives seldom drive the design of smart city policies, which are often written in a universal “we” that erases divergent experiences of being watched.
Everyday resistance in a data-driven city
None of this means that residents simply accept surveillance culture without question. Everyday resistance exists, even if it does not look like dramatic confrontations with the state.
Some forms are practical: people covering their doors with stickers to block certain camera angles; choosing older hawker stalls that still take cash; sharing tips on how to navigate digital systems without giving away more data than necessary. Others are discursive: conversations in coffee shops, group chats and community spaces where people share discomfort with the intensity of monitoring, or critique the assumption that more data always equals better policy.
Artists, writers and filmmakers in Singapore have also used their work to probe the emotional texture of life in a heavily managed city – the sense of being constantly measured, the anxiety around making mistakes under the gaze of authorities and neighbours, the longing for spaces that feel unobserved. These cultural responses remind us that debates about urban surveillance technologies are not only technical but profoundly affective.
At the same time, we need to be honest about the limits of individual coping strategies. Choosing to pay in cash does not dismantle the broader architecture of data-driven governance. Turning away from the CCTV lens does not erase your presence from other databases. The point is not to romanticise small acts of refusal, but to see them as signals that something in the social contract of the Singapore smart city is under strain.
Rethinking “smart” from the ground up
The dominant story of smart cities still centres on efficiency and innovation. It measures success in app adoption rates, sensor coverage and rankings in global smart city indexes. Much less attention is paid to how these technologies redistribute power, redefine citizenship and reshape the boundaries of what feels politically imaginable.
If we start from those questions instead, a different picture of Singapore Smart Nation emerges. It is a city that has invested heavily in digital infrastructures and governance capacity, achieving real improvements in transport, service delivery and urban planning. But it is also a place where digital paternalism risks narrowing democratic horizons, where participation is welcomed only when it does not disrupt technocratic consensus, and where compliant behaviour is quietly coded into the very architecture of daily life.
For readers in the UK and elsewhere, Singapore is often presented as a model to emulate: a clean, efficient, “world-class” smart city. The challenge is to learn from Singapore without importing its blind spots – to ask not only how we can make cities more connected, but who gets to decide what that connection is for, who benefits most from algorithmic governance, and how those most affected by surveillance cultures can shape the rules that govern them.
A genuinely progressive approach to smart urbanism would treat data not as a neutral resource to be exploited, but as a site of political struggle and collective decision-making. It would centre the experiences of those who live with the highest levels of monitoring and the least control over how their data is used. And it would insist that smart city politics must always remain open to contestation, rather than locking citizens into a future they are only invited to upgrade, never to rewrite.
References:
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Chia, O. (2023, November 7). Lights out on plan for network of smart lamp posts that detect speeding e-scooters and unruly crowds. The Straits Times. https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/politics/lights-out-on-plan-for-network-of-smart-lamp-posts-that-detect-speeding-e-scooters-and-unruly-crowds
Chin, H. S. (2023, August 4). HDB approval no longer needed for corridor-facing CCTVs in flats; demand for devices up. The Straits Times. https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/hdb-approval-no-longer-needed-for-corridor-facing-cctvs-in-flats-demand-for-devices-on-the-rise
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