Thursday, 7 April 2022
Introduction
A very good afternoon to all of you and it is indeed my pleasure and delight to join you for today’s dialogue.
How COVID-19 Has Reshaped the Built Environment Sector
Over the last two years, the pandemic has had a very significant impact on our city, on our Built Environment (BE) sector, causing – manpower shortages, supply disruptions, productivity loss due to SMMs at worksites. And a lot more. Ups and downs, twists and turns, surprises upon surprises, stresses and strains. We could see all our professionals in the sector, our firms, our workers, consultants, under tremendous strain – it was unprecedented for many of us.
And as projects were delayed, many architects had to stay on longer, or to revise their designs to facilitate changes in construction plans, often at very short notice.
It has been challenging for everyone, to say the least, but we are actually not out of the woods yet. Although SMMs have been eased, we remain vigilant. And MND, together with many of our partners, we are always keeping in mind the need to dust out our SOPs and be able to resurrect some of our measures quickly, if things don’t always turn out our way.
But we will keep pressing on, and I would like to thank all of you, for your forbearance, for your understanding, for your partnership, for your sacrifice and for many contributions you have made in these difficult times.
And while we are seeing steady signs of recovery, we still face a lot of uncertainty, stemming from the aftermath of COVID, the fear of future variants, and of course, geo-political events around us.
Ar. Melvin Tan has highlighted some of these concerns, and we can of course discuss the current state of architecture and the future of the profession, difficulties in attracting the next generation of young architects, and so on. These are important concerns and indeed, we have been having regular conversations on these issues between government agencies and industry partners, at various platforms. And we can discuss some of these matters further during our dialogue.
Future of Singapore as a City
But since SIA has asked for this to be an “Inspirational Talk”, I will try my best to fulfil this “design brief”.
So I thought I would use this brief amount of time to sketch out a little bit of what our future city could look like – and some of the many exciting aspects of our development that we’re working towards, to meet the evolving needs and aspirations of our people and generations yet unborn, and how we hope to partner our architects to turn these ideas a reality.
Design and Planning in a Post-COVID World
First, COVID has shown that the built environment and our city planning play a critical role in mitigating public health risks and pandemics. And so the way we plan and design our city and how we retrofit older buildings will have to adapt accordingly. For instance, can we design our buildings and public spaces to better protect public health, including by introducing more ventilation and open spaces?
We have to prepare for other trends arising from the pandemic too. For instance, as more people work from home or work away from office more often, how should our commercial and residential spaces change in response? Should we inject more flexibility into traditionally mono-use offices, or bring more workspaces into residential estates?
And as more people turn to the outdoors for respite and rejuvenation, how can we better shape our blue and green spaces to improve physical and mental wellbeing? Now, we don’t want to jump right into the action, because we want to settle down and be able to differentiate what are short term reflexes, from what are likely to be longer term, permanent, necessary changes that are a direct result of COVID. So let’s settle down, and then we decide what to hard-code, change, pilot, and experiment. But certainly, the way we design and plan our city will have to change. Let’s take COVID as a big lesson, and move forward with those lessons in mind.
Sustainability and City in Nature
Next, another major effort that we’ve embarked on is making our city more sustainable, as part of the Singapore Green Plan. And here, urban design and planning make a tremendous difference too.
We are working hard to green our buildings, which contribute at this moment, to 20% of our emissions here in Singapore. Building on more than a decade of efforts in this area, many architects already incorporate climate-resilient solutions in your projects. An example is the National University of Singapore’s School of Design and Environment 4, which is a Green Mark Platinum Zero Energy building.
We will continue to need your support, your ideas and your energy, to keep pushing the boundaries on sustainable buildings – by designing buildings to be more energy-efficient, for instance, or by choosing low-carbon materials where possible.
We’re also doing more to protect our natural environment. While Singapore is already a green City in a Garden, we want to transform it into a City in Nature.
Unlike other major cities, our important natural habitats and core biodiversity are located not outside the city, but right in the heart of our city – and we are one of very few major cities in the world, where you can find primary, pristine rainforest, no matter how little it may be, right in the heart of the city. There are many big cities with primary rainforests all around it, for sure. But at the heart of the city - apart from Singapore, and Rio de Janeiro, perhaps just a few others.
So we have to weave nature seamlessly into our urban fabric, for nature to thrive within and throughout our city. And remember that our core habitats are divided by the city – as such how can we plan and design our urban spaces to allow flora to disperse and fauna to traverse between different core habitats - and that impinges on your design and architecture.
And this requires innovative and practical design, that we hope to work with our architects on – so that our green and blue spaces are naturalised in a way that is conducive for both our people and our biodiversity. Now, one example that comes to mind is the naturalised river at Bishan-Ang Mo Kio Park. That’s top of people’s minds, but actually there are many other examples that are very creative and very thoughtful architects have helped us to imagine and to realise.
Heritage
But beyond our City in Nature ambition, many Singaporeans also aspire to live in a distinctive and unique city, but one that still feels like home, and this home.
So an important aspect of this involves celebrating our built heritage – the architecturally and historically significant buildings that intimately connect us with our past. That is tremendous challenge for a city as dense as ours.
To better conserve our shared history, we will formalise a heritage evaluation framework, or a Heritage Impact Assessment framework, for larger-scale development projects in areas of heritage significance. In this journey, we need your help to breathe new life into Singapore’s heritage buildings – by finding innovative ways to respect a building’s history, while keeping it relevant in today’s context.
Now the recently conserved Golden Mile Complex is one example of a locally designed icon, and masterpiece, with interesting potential for adaptive reuse. But which requires both our architectural profession, our engineers and our builders to be able to bring new kinds of skillsets into Singapore, for that kind of work.
Urban Planning and Intensifying Land-Use
Next, we must continue to optimise our limited land, to provide more options for future generations. Over the years, we have developed and employed various strategies – we have begun to put utilities and supporting infrastructure underground, for example the Labrador electrical substation, which will free up 3 hectares of land for a 34-storey commercial development.
We facilitate the circular use of resources – for instance, the upcoming Tuas Nexus not only integrates the Tuas Water Reclamation Plant and Integrated Waste Management Facility to minimise land use, it also converts waste to energy from the waste management facility, to energy through incineration, so that we can reduce the space we need for landfills. And we find ways to do more with the land and infrastructure that we already have. So we hope that our architects will continue to lend us your skills and creativity, as we keep seeking new ways to maximise the potential of our limited land.
Rejuvenating our City
Now part of optimising our land use also means redeveloping and rejuvenating our city over time, to keep it vibrant, relevant and in good condition. Now in some cases, like the Greater Southern Waterfront and the Paya Lebar Airbase, we will free up large tracts of land that we can comprehensively reimagine, replan and redesign together – and we invite your views and suggestions on these new and exciting projects. In other cases, rejuvenation will allow us to reimagine existing towns and neighbourhoods altogether.
For example, over the next few decades, we will progressively redevelop some of our older public housing estates as they age, through the Voluntary Early Redevelopment Scheme (VERS) and other programmes. So we are actively planning for the next few decades, and what is effectively a whole new reimagination about public housing, public housing living and HDB living.
Inclusivity
And this brings me to my final point today, which is to make Singapore even more inclusive and accessible – for people of all abilities, ages, and socio-economic backgrounds. This is also a major aspiration for many Singaporeans.
For example, we are bringing together partners from the people, private, and public sectors, to study how to improve the accessibility of our urban infrastructure for persons with disabilities. Not just at a code level, not just to carry out audits, but actually going onto the ground, and understanding people’s movement patterns and living patterns. And looking at accessibility from that level, from the ground level, flying through people’s day to day lives and making accessibility a reality where it counts on the ground. And we’re doing this, as I said, in a very localised way – we form teams in our CBD and some of our HDB heartlands, to focus on the actual lived realities of people who navigate these areas daily.
We are also partnering the community to better support healthier lifestyles and active ageing in our neighbourhoods. The Health District @ Queenstown is one of our contributions to that effort – we are working with researchers and community partners on this pilot. And using town and urban planning, architectural design, and community interventions and programmes in tandem, we want to enhance the health and well-being of people who live in those estates.
And in these ways, we strive to shape a more inclusive city – and we hope to partner our architects in this important endeavour. So that our city can become more people-centric, more liveable, and more conducive for social interaction.
Conclusion
So let me conclude. As our city matures, we will face new challenges – some unforeseen, some like the pandemic. But there will also be new technologies and new opportunities – and what I’ve talked about today are just some of the many things we can work on together.
Architects play a special role in this – you lay out the blueprint for how we can build more sustainably, innovatively, and inclusively. In a way that also respects the distinctive heritage of our city, and the biodiversity that thrives within it.
So I would like to thank all of you for your contributions, and sacrifices, and let’s work together to keep improving our city. And I look forward to our dialogue after this. Thank you.