stylistic:tone, stylistic:style_transfer
Environment

Lee envisioned Singapore as a garden city, declaring that "no other hallmark of success will be more distinctive than that of achieving our position as the cleanest and greenest city in Southeast Asia ". He would later say that " greening is the most cost-effective project I have launched".

Lee set up an 'Anti-Pollution Unit' stating that its importance resided in giving citizens "respite from city centres" and in the small size of Singapore which made it necessary to "preserve a clean and gracious environment for rich and poor alike". In 1995 Lee declared "I have always believed that a blighted urban landscape, a concrete jungle, destroys the human spirit. We need the greenery of nature to lift our spirits".

Lee saw this as a means of attracting tourists and businesspeople to the city. He wrote that "without a word being said, they would know that Singaporeans were competent, disciplined, and reliable, a people who would learn the skills they required soon enough". After independence Lee sought for "some dramatic way to distinguish ourselves from other Third World countries. I settled for a clean and green Singapore" because "if we had First World standards then business people and tourists would make us a base for their business and tours of the region".

Lee considered air conditioning the most important invention of the 20th century for Singapore. Air quality relates to work quality and as such Lee made sure air conditioning was installed in the offices of the Singaporean civil service in the 1960s.