World’s apart. By Inès COQUEL & Amélys COURET

 Singapore, the "Lion City" 

Grenoble, the "capital of the Alps"

Inès writes...

This picture was taken on February the 11th 2012 from a famous hotel in Singapore called the Marina Bay Hotel. I felt tiny, lost among so many giant buildings. Singapore is in Southern Asia, on the equator, so the weather is very humid all the time and the temperature quite high. I felt clammy. Hundreds of people were walking slowly along the bay. I remembered what my History teacher said about this place, that it was built on land fill. Less than fifty years ago, this place was was not even here. From the top of this hotel, we can see durian trees, a theatre, a mall, the statue of the Merlion (sea-lion, symbol of Singapore), and the Raffle hotel (oldest building in Singapore, it used to be the Post Office).

Amélys writes...

The second photo was taken in March 2014 in Grenoble, France. We can see the big city with lots of buildings. When I took this picture, the weather was damp and cold. It's a great souvenir now, but I didn’t feel very reassured in the cable car! Grenoble is a very interesting city; there are many different styles of architectures. On the right, in the background, there’s a very long avenue which looks like the Champs Elysée in Paris. There are different types of buildings. In the foreground, there are council flats with lots of windows; it contrasts with the building with the more ornate facade and the slate roof. On the left hand, there is the Olympic stadium. In the middle, there is the City Hotel which is very modern. In Grenoble, there is grass along the tramway. There is a famous cable car which goes over the river and up to an old part of town from which we can admire the view of the city surrounded by mountains.

Singapore is one of the most dynamic cities in the world; Grenoble is not, despite some pretentions at being an important European center of scientific research. Nothing much has happened in Grenoble since the Winter Olympic Games of 1968, apart from the completion in 2009 of the first eco-district in a French city. Singapore, though populous and highly developed, is trying to become a more ecologically-friendly city.

The question is: what makes a city like Singapore become, in less than fifty years, one of the most influential cities in the world, and a city like Grenoble stay so provincial, where the most exciting thing to go on the “bulles”, the Grenoble-Bastille cable car (inaugurated in 1934)?