Weary commuters stream off the train at the station in Punggol, a district on Singapore’s east coast, as retired engineer Michael Ng and his wife hunt down a restaurant in the area known for its seafood.

Like many parts of the Asian city-state, Punggol has been transformed by the economic miracle that propelled Singapore from what was a southeast Asian backwater after independence from Malaysia in 1965 – two years after gaining independence from Britain in 1963 – into one of the world’s most successful economies.

The last pig farm in Punggol closed in 1990 as the area’s kampongs – a Malay word for village – gave way to dense developments of government housing, home for thousands of Singapore citizens and, increasingly, migrant workers from China that make up a large proportion of the island’s 1.3m population of foreigners. The total population is 5.3m – about the same as Norway.