Speech by Minister Desmond Lee at the IPS Singapore Perspectives 2022 Conference

Monday, 24 January 2022

It is my privilege and pleasure to be here this afternoon with all of you. As you’ve seen throughout this conference, cities mean different things to different people. There have been rich discussions and conversations about many aspects of our city – how our city can be more inclusive, liveable, and green; how our city can remain connected, internally and externally, physically and digitally; and how people in our city interact and get along with one another.

What these discussions show is that our city reflects the diversity of our society. We’re diverse not just in race and religion, but increasingly in our ideas and perspectives. The challenge for us has always been how to balance these different priorities and ambitions, to give them space to flourish within our small island city-state.

For among the major cities, we remain one of the smallest in the world – about a third the size of Tokyo and half the size of London, depending on how much of a metropolis we decide to designate. Not only are we a small city, we’re both a city and a country – one of just three modern city-states worldwide, possibly the only one responsible for defence, foreign affairs and many other thing that you associate with a full sovereign state. Which means unlike other cities, we must fit everything that a sovereign country needs, like air connectivity through airports, sea connectivity through our seaports, defence through our military bases and air bases, reservoirs for water resilience, incineration plants and a lot more, well within our city limits, when cities in larger countries have the opportunity to place these necessary essentials far beyond the city limits.

So as we strive to bring all the elements of our nation and society together in our small city-state, we will always face intensely difficult trade-offs and the choices that we make will define the society that we become.

In this sense, city planning for us is not just a technical, professional or infrastructural process. It is a socio-political process – it’s about nurturing our society and becoming the nation that we want aspire to be.

In his keynote address at the start of this conference, my colleague, Minister Ong Ye Kung, looked back at some of the great cities of the past as well as cities in the present day, and what we can learn from them.

So today, to round off the conference, I’d like to look forward, to our city of the future – to imagine what Singapore could become in the decades ahead, and what we’ll need to do to get there together.

Preparing for Major Trends

Let me start by discussing some major trends coming our way, and how we’re preparing for them.

Climate change and sustainability

One big challenge is climate change. As a low-lying island nation, Singapore is particularly vulnerable to the effects of climate change, such as rising sea levels and more extreme weather. So we’ll need to take steps to protect our city and our people by raising the land, literally, that our buildings are built on, enhancing our drainage system, constructing sea walls and polders as defences to keep the sea out. And all this could cost some $100 billion or more over the next 50 or 100 years – a major investment and an act of faith.

Beyond adapting our city for climate change, we’re also doing our part to mitigate it. We launched the Green Plan last year. It has five pillars, which will collectively remake almost every aspect of our lives – how we live, how we work, and how we get around. If we work hard at it, pull people together and unite them, we can thoroughly transform Singapore into a truly sustainable city of the future. Here are some things we’re working on.

We’re growing Singapore into a City in Nature, weaving nature more intensively into our city in many ways: Actively restoring and enhancing our core biodiversity areas, which we’ve conserved right in the heart of our city; setting aside more nature parks, which serve to buffer for our core habitats; naturalising our parks, waterways, and street-side greenery to help wildlife traverse our city; planting one million more trees within this decade. And by 2030, we want every household to live within a 10-minute walk from a park.

We’re making our urban infrastructure a lot more sustainable too, and we must. We are making our buildings much more energy efficient, while using more sustainable construction material and practices. For example, we’ve raised our minimum energy performance requirements and refreshed our Green Mark scheme. In fact, under our latest Green Building Masterplan, we want to green 80% of our buildings by the end of this decade, ensure that 80% of new buildings from 2030 are Super Low Energy buildings, and have our best-in-class buildings reach 80% energy efficiency improvement from 2005 levels, by the end of this decade. We call these targets “80-80-80 in 2030”, focusing the minds of industry and Singaporeans on how much more work we need to do to make our city green. And we’re bringing solar panels, smart lighting, heat-reflecting paint and other technologies into our HDB towns and heartlands to make them much greener too.

We’re pushing hard on our transportation system as well. We’re phasing out all internal combustion engine vehicles by 2040, which is less than 20 years from now. But, we’ll need to invest in infrastructure to support this major transition, including an extensive network of charging points for electric vehicles all across our island. We continue to improve our public transport network by building more MRT stations and lines, rolling out cleaner energy buses, and we’re expanding our cycling path network to around 1,300 kilometres by 2030.

We’re also greening our power grid by installing solar panels in all sorts of places – on the roofs of HDB blocks, floating on reservoirs. And in the future, we’ll strive to develop regional power grids and import low-carbon electricity from abroad.

At the same time, we need more than just “hardware” or infrastructural improvements. Sustainability is not just about “hardware”. We need the “software” or “heartware” too – by making sustainability a key part of how we live, part of our DNA every single day: cut down energy use, reduce our waste, recycle a lot more; bring sustainability into the heart of our schools through enhanced curricula and programmes, and make our campuses greener; and create green jobs and a greener economy in areas like carbon emissions measurement or verification, energy-efficient technology and green financing. We’re supporting companies to build capabilities and do research in sustainability solutions, and our carbon tax seeks to reduce the carbon footprint across our economy.

So the Green Plan really is a whole-of-nation effort – it’s ambitious, it’s comprehensive, we’ll continue to push further, and we’ll need everyone on board to make it a reality.

Inclusive and united society

Besides climate change, which is top-of-mind around the world, another major challenge is to continue fostering a more inclusive and united society here in our city-state. Societies all around the world are becoming more polarised along race, religion, socio-economic status or political ideologies. This is exacerbated by the online space, where it is much easier to interact only with those who agree with us and shun others who do not.

But as Professor Carlo Ratti of MIT observed in an earlier panel, physical spaces can be an “antidote” to this because in physical spaces we have to meet, adapt, adjust and accommodate those around us, no matter how different they are.

In Singapore, we proactively plan our city to create opportunities for different groups to interact, in and around where they live. We have policies like the Ethnic Integration Policy, which seeks to ensure a representative mix of races in our HDB heartlands.

We also encourage interaction among people of different socio-economic backgrounds. We recently launched a new model for public housing in prime locations, so that these areas are accessible to more Singaporeans, and not only the well-to-do, bearing in mind how, over time, different parts of our city rise and fall in value. We want to make sure our public housing strategy injects public housing and Singaporeans from all walks of life into these areas. We will introduce public rental housing for lower-income households in these prime locations too. In fact, we’re integrating public rental flats with home ownership flats across our island, in some cases even within the same block.

We pair these policies with programmes and activities to encourage community bonding. And for lower-income households in public rental housing, important social initiatives like ComLink provide holistic and coordinated support for those living in rental flats in healthcare, education and other areas. So, it’s not just housing for lower-income, but housing with social support coming along with it. HDB’s dedicated Home ownership Support Team will also guide them in buying their own home when they’re ready to do so.

In these ways, we actively support social integration and mobility, and don’t seek to leave it to chance.

Being inclusive also means designing our city to meet the needs of different groups, especially those who need more support. My colleague Mr Lim Eng Hwee (CEO of URA) shared on this too in an earlier session.

We have also been putting in effort to better support persons with disabilities in our city. Through regulations like BCA’s Accessibility Code, as well as various agencies’ efforts to design and install accessibility infrastructure, we’ve made many parts of our city more barrier-free. But from the everyday experience of differently abled Singaporeans, gaps still exist, which we can do more to address.

We’ve set up the Accessible City Network, which brings together the public, private, and people sectors, to explore close-up ways to enhance the accessibility of our city at the ground level, guided by the lived realities of persons with disabilities – by improving way-finding tools, for instance, or by identifying overlooked opportunities for more barrier-free features. So, we’re not just leaving it to regulations and compliance, but we’re actually bringing communities together – building owners, public agencies, corporates, NGOs, disability groups and individuals who live, work on those areas to identify at the micro-level or ground-level, what the problems are to fix them. We’ve started pilots in the CBD, as well as in some heartland neighbourhoods. So it’s not just about the issue, but the way in which we seek to address these issues on the ground is different.

This is just one initiative from our Third Enabling Masterplan. We refresh this Masterplan every five years to lay out how we can better empower persons with disabilities in various aspects of their lives here in our city-state.

These are just some of the ways in which we plan and build our city for a more inclusive society.

I’ve talked about climate change, I’ve talked about accessibility and inclusiveness, and next I will talk about population ageing.

Preparing for a Silver Generation

Population ageing is another major trend we’re facing. Our proportion of citizens above the age of 65 increased from around 1 in 10 a decade ago, to around 1 in 6 today. This should rise to almost 1 in 4 by the end of this decade. We have a responsibility to take good care of our seniors, who have contributed so much to our nation’s progress.

We’re taking steps to make our city much more senior-friendly. We’ve retrofitted almost all our older HDB blocks to bring lifts to every floor. And where we haven’t been able to do so, we continue to seek possible solutions, and in the meanwhile, we help those with urgent mobility issues to move to a home with direct lift access. We also help to install features like grab bars, ramps, and slip-resistant flooring in seniors’ flats, at highly subsidised rates to make the flats more senior-friendly. And our agencies subsidise senior mobility devices to allow them to get around to meet their friends and carry on their day-to-day activities.

We also want to help seniors age-in-place, to stay engaged in the local communities that they are familiar with, without having to uproot to a totally new environment. We’re piloting a new type of flats, the Community Care Apartments, which integrate senior-friendly housing with care services, communal spaces and programmes so that our seniors can continue living independently in a vibrant community, while still getting the care that they may need with their daily activities.

Similarly, integrated developments like Kampong Admiralty and an upcoming one in Yew Tee bring housing, medical, commercial, and community facilities all together, so that seniors can meet their different needs easily.

Again, besides these infrastructural features, social and community support is vital. We are developing Community Networks for Seniors, by bringing together stakeholders in local communities – volunteers, welfare groups, government agencies, and others – to engage and support our seniors together.

We’re preparing our city in these ways and more, so that together we can celebrate the blessings of more good years for our seniors, and benefit from their wisdom, experience and guidance for many more.  

Keeping our City in good condition

As our people age and our nation matures, our city will also grow old. We will therefore need to make a special effort, not just to develop new parts of our city, but also to upkeep the quality of our existing infrastructure.

Many cities much older than us have learnt hard lessons on the need for good city maintenance. The neglect of roads and highways may give rise to more accidents. Damaged and leaky pipes could lead to declining water quality. Buildings that fall into disrepair become safety hazards or hotspots for crime. So we’re working hard to guard against such urban decay.

We upgrade our HDB flats as they age to keep them in good condition through the Home Improvement Programme (HIP). In fact, we’ll do two rounds of HIP, highly subsidised, for each HDB flat – once when they’re around 30 years old, and a second time when they’re about 60 to 70 years old. We’ve also rolled out a Periodic Façade Inspection regime to regularly check building facades for any signs of degradation so that issues can be rectified quickly before accidents occur.

And we’ll continue to push the boundaries of Facilities Management and Maintenance by exploring how to use more advanced technologies to take care of our buildings as they age, as well as integrated and aggregated facilities management, which bundles different services across clusters of buildings together for better economies of scale.

At the same time, for those older buildings that form important parts of our collective heritage, we will not only keep them in good condition for our future generations, but we will also refresh them so that they remain vibrant and relevant through time. This way, the future of our city will remain connected with our past and our memories.

Managing land-use pressures

Finally, one evergreen challenge that we grapple with is how to make the most of our very limited land to cater to the many competing and growing needs that we’ve described and more, as our society continues to progress and our aspirations evolve, grow and amplify.

We need space for more housing. Demand has risen, partly because of the “echo boomer” generation – the children of the baby boomers, born in the 80s and 90s, who are now starting their families and seeking their own homes. But demand is also driven partly due to changes in social structures and aspirations, wants and needs - smaller households, including more single-person households, and children and their parents preferring to live apart, rather than in multi-generation homes.

At the same time, we want more space for nature and greenery for respite and mental wellbeing, as more Singaporeans develop a greater appreciation for the outdoors, especially during this pandemic. And we need space for more healthcare facilities, cultural and recreational amenities, seniors’ facilities, economic areas for new industries, laboratories for research and innovation, among many, many other demands.

But we only have about 730 square kilometres of land. So we need to be very disciplined and creative to make room for all these different needs. Our challenge is very different from the challenge of other cities in much larger countries. So, we have to coordinate tightly across agencies and carefully plan the different parts of our island, to achieve a balanced mix of land uses.

We have to plan long-term. We have a Master Plan to guide our development over the next 10 to 15 years, which we review every five years. And every ten years, we update our Long-Term Plan for the next 50 years and beyond.

We employ a variety of strategies to maximise land-use. We intensify our use of land, for instance by building higher, or by co-locating different facilities and stacking them on top of each other. We reclaim land where feasible, and even use underground space, guided by our Underground Masterplan. And we redevelop and rejuvenate existing developments, to free up land for new and more high-intensity uses. Some of these will give us large pieces of land that will enable bold and major urban transformations such as the Greater Southern Waterfront, the Jurong Lake District, and the Paya Lebar Airbase when it is relocated.

As I said earlier, as a city-state, we face land-use pressures more intensely than other cities. This is our burden to bear, but it is also our calling and our opportunity, and it pushes us to keep finding better ways to make the most of what we have.

Preparing for uncertainties

Climate change, societal polarisation, population ageing, city maintenance, tightening land-use pressures – these are trends that we can anticipate for a city and a city-state, the “known unknowns”. But in an increasingly volatile and uncertain world, we also need to prepare for the “unknown unknowns”.

COVID-19 is one example. As Minister Ong put it, it is a “reset button”, forcing us to re-think the way we do things – how we will live, work, play, travel, or see the doctor in this “new normal”? Will we need so much office and retail space, as more work and shop from home? Do our neighbourhoods need more community co-working areas? How can we make “rush hour” a thing of the past?

Innovation is borne out of crises, and the pandemic is a chance for us to do things better and smarter, as we design our future city. We need to prepare for different possibilities by planning for greater flexibility in our city. For instance, we may need to safeguard more land to stockpile and produce essential materials during supply disruptions or set aside flexible “white spaces” for emergency use. This may mean that we can’t maximise all our available land now, but it will help us to build resilience for future challenges.

Recognising the many uncertainties we face, we will develop long-term plans that will preserve flexibility and optionality for the future, for instance, through our ongoing exercise which we call the Long-Term Plan Review.

A Vision of our Future City

These are some of the many things we’re doing to prepare our city for the future. If we put them together, what kind of Singapore might we see? We could see a city that celebrates diversity where we find joy in our commonalities and make space for our differences, where we are brought closer through common spaces that we build together.

We could see a city that is more inclusive, designed for people with different needs and abilities, not as an afterthought or a retrofit, but from the outset, with intentionality and heart. Schools, homes, streets and parks with people-centred designs, based on lived experiences.

We could see a city in harmony with nature, not just decorated with gardens and landscapes, but living with nature as it is, in our midst, in all its beauty and majesty.

We could see a climate-ready city where sustainability is a way of life. And perhaps, even going beyond a sustainable city that minimises damage to the environment, to a restorative one that heals the damage caused, and one day, to a regenerative city – one that does more for the environment than it might take away.  

We could see a digitally-enabled, globally-connected city that also serves as home, not just connected, but a connector – a hub for trade in goods and services, but also digital flows and the exchange of skills and ideas.  

Yet through all our reinvention, we should also see a city rooted in its memories and its heritage, where our history will be chronicled not just in books, but also in our buildings and landscapes, which are not conserved as empty monuments, but given fresh leases of life, respectful of the memories of these buildings.

We could see a society that cares even more, a close-knit community that uplifts each other, especially those who need more support.

How to get there

What do we need to achieve our vision of our future city? There are many things that we need to do, and you can have a very long laundry list. But I will just spend the next few moments to highlight three important elements, among others – trust, stewardship, and collective action.

Trust

First, a community of trust. City planning involves hard decisions – balancing competing interests, across time and space. There are no perfect solutions and we will all need to make some compromises, including tough ones.

In such situations, trust becomes key. When we share our views, do we trust that we will be heard? Do we trust that those who disagree with us love this city as much as we do, so that we can try to find common ground? And when decisions are made, do we trust that they are made in our best shared interests, considering all perspectives?

Trust doesn’t mean we always have to agree, but it means we must believe that despite our disagreements, we always have the interests of our city at heart. Fostering this takes hard work and there will be stumbles along the way, and it only comes with building deep relationships over time.

Stewardship

The second element that we need is stewardship. Our land and resources – they are precious, and we must steward it with care. This means thinking long-term because our city is not just for us, but for our children and their children to come.

This is what our forefathers did for us. Their long-term vision gave us iconic features of our city such as Changi Airport, Marina Bay and our MRT networks, which took many years to build and have stood us in good stead. Yet they also set aside swathes of land for us. We are using these for bold urban transformation plans which I spoke about a little earlier. As these plans are realised, they will create new and interesting spaces for the next generation, who will, in turn, pursue their own rejuvenation plans and shape the city in the vision they aspire to.

So let’s take good care of our city and our environment today as stewards, so that future generations have space for their dreams too.

Action

The third and final element is collective action. Open conversations like the ones at this conference are important. Yet, beyond discussion and ideation, let us also take action. Roll up our sleeves and work together. And that is what the Singapore Together movement seeks to achieve. All of us have a part to play in the future of our society and city-state.

So if I may put this question to all of us: as we reflect on the insights from this conference, what is one thing that we will do to contribute to this city that we call home? How can we partner you?

Conclusion

Let me conclude. We only have one city, and we must make the most of it now and into the future. There are significant challenges ahead of us, some of them existential – climate change, the possible fragmentation of our society, and potential future pandemics.

But we have started preparing for the trends coming our way. And if we continue to work well together – bounded by trust, adopting a mindset of stewardship, and taking collective action – then I am confident that we are better placed to achieve our vision of a better Singapore.

Thank you for listening and I look forward to our dialogue.