Speech by Minister Desmond Lee at NUS Cities Symposium 2024 - "Liveable Cities in Uncertain Times"
Sep 18, 2024
Good morning. I am glad to join you for this year’s NUS Cities Symposium, bringing together a multi-disciplinary team of professionals, to come together under an umbrella like this, and to think about cities as a whole.
This Symposium is a valuable opportunity for all of us to exchange ideas and extend our knowledge on liveable, resilient, and sustainable cities. I’m proud that NUS Cities Symposium is a partner in the International Built Environment Week.
This morning, I will take a few moments to talk about Singapore’s approach to urban planning, and how we can all do our part to ensure that Singapore continues to remain liveable and sustainable, amidst significant uncertainties ahead.
FORWARD PLANNING FOR UNCERTAINTY, NAVIGATING COMPLEXITIES
Indeed today, we live in an era of fast-paced, unprecedented change. Not just change, but also the intensity of those experiences. Complex trends like climate change, a rapidly ageing population, and advancements in artificial intelligence can profoundly change the way we live, work, and play. They will also affect various groups differently, and can have implications across generations.
As a small island city-state, we feel these challenges even more keenly. We have very limited land and resources, yet there are many competing needs and potentially unlimited wants. Our planners and policy makers do not have an easy task, but it is not impossible. We must be able to turn challenges into opportunities.
Against this backdrop of constant, accelerating change, how do we keep Singapore liveable and sustainable?
First, we need to actively plan for the future, and carefully steward our land and resources. That has been our ethos all these decades. This often involves making difficult decisions and weighing trade-offs that are becoming increasingly stark. In Singapore, we’ve always had this discipline in planning. Our predecessors set the base.
Every 10 years, we conduct a review of our Long-Term Plan, which we called the Concept Plan, to plan for Singapore’s land use for the next 50 years and beyond. Every 5 years, we translate the broad strategies from this Long-Term Plan into detailed ground plans for the next 10 to 15 years under the Draft Master Plan Review, which is currently ongoing. We plan for the long term, and make sure we translate the uncertainties that the long term horizon entails, into tangible short term and mid-term actions on the ground.
Second, it is important that we continue to stay nimble and agile as a nation. There’s a bit of tension when we talk about land use – the fact that we plan for something that takes a long time, and yet how do we stay agile and nimble? As our circumstances change, so must our plans.
We keep track of shifting trends, and have to review our plans accordingly. For example, we have been refreshing the strategies to sustain a vibrant economy and to meet the evolving needs of businesses and workers. Over the past 3 decades, our planners have sought to decentralise job nodes and provide a range of workspaces for different business needs. These have led to vibrant growth nodes, such as the one that we are standing in right now – our Greater one-north precinct comprising one-north, Science Park, and NUS.
We are already seeing new business models and more flexible styles of working amongst our workforce. From our Long-Term Plan Review engagements and dialogues, we understand that business owners prioritise flexibility to reconfigure their physical space needs, so that they can quickly adapt their business models, adopt new technologies, and integrate with partners along the value chain. We will therefore need to step up and support them, and move to rejuvenate our business parks and re-imagine our industrial spaces, so that they can continue to be relevant and desirable workspaces for our businesses and workers.
We may also encounter Black Swan events that demand our urgent response. We saw this very starkly during the last pandemic. Agencies had to set up medical facilities to carry out testing, vaccination, and treatment, as well as additional dorms to contain the COVID-19 spread at worker dormitories, all in a very short span of time. That is why even as we plan long term, we also try to retain flexibility on our land use, so that we can pivot our spaces quickly to respond to new needs.
Lastly, we must be unafraid to take bold steps to safeguard the best future for generations to come. This means not thinking not just about our current needs and consuming resources for our current generation, but thinking about future generations and stewarding resources, so that we hand to them a better and more robust Singapore than the one we have now.
Take the plans for Long Island as an example. It has been many years in the planning. Long Island integrates coastal protection measures with future reclamation plans. As a result, we will not only safeguard our low-lying East Coast area against sea-level rise, we will also create a new reservoir that will enhance our water security in the decades ahead, as well as new land that Singaporeans, decades into the future, can imagine and use.
Another example is district cooling. We formally commissioned the Marina Bay District Cooling Network in 2016. Back then, it was the first of its kind in the world, and we took a calculated risk to invest significantly in the project. Today, it stands as the world’s largest underground cooling network, delivering both space efficiencies and energy savings. It plays an important role in our efforts to make Singapore more sustainable.
Looking ahead, we plan to expand the implementation of district cooling more widely. I am glad to share that my colleagues at URA will introduce new incentives to encourage more building owners to adopt District Cooling Systems in their buildings. From today, building owners will receive bonus Gross Floor Area if they establish new District Cooling Systems, or tap on an existing one.
CREATING OUR LIVEABLE CITY TOGETHER
Our agencies work very closely to create our liveable city. With the kinds of complexities of the challenges we face, and the uncertainties in the road ahead, we will need a lot of coordination and cooperation among agencies – not just land use agencies and infrastructure agencies, but also social agencies and economic agencies. Whether its Long Island or our COVID-19 response, we have to more tightly coordinate our plans and actions to tackle these complex issues and uncertainties.
However, planning a city is not something our planners and policymakers can do alone. All of you are our partners in this journey, creating our shared urban future together.
As mentioned, URA’s Draft Master Plan 2025 is currently ongoing. As part of our Draft Master Plan review, we have been actively holding public engagements, dialogues, focus group discussions, exhibitions and so on, to seek the views of Singaporeans and our stakeholders from all walks of life. These include seeking feedback and ideas on how we can plan for new residential neighbourhoods in more central locations in Singapore, more attractive jobs near to our homes, and a range of recreation spaces for all to enjoy. Next month, URA will be exhibiting our ideas and plans to develop more vibrant and future-ready growth nodes. Do look out for it, and we welcome your ideas on how we can prepare well for the future of work.
One other area we are seeking feedback on right now is how we can enhance our programme for Landscaping for Urban Spaces and High-rises, or LUSH. LUSH is currently in its third instalment. This programme was implemented back in 2017, to help us improve the quality and density of skyrise greenery planted. This is part of enhancing our City in Nature, and helps with Urban Heat Island Effect. We need schemes like these, and we review them so that they remain relevant and flexible, and enable us to achieve our goals for a greener city.
LUSH 4.0 will enhance the current programme, by introducing new biodiversity-enhancing guidelines to improve the potential biodiversity of skyrise greenery. URA is currently engaging industry professionals, academics and researchers, and Nature Groups on how these guidelines in LUSH 4.0 should look like. I look forward to sharing more when we are ready.
We take a collaborative approach in our partnerships with the industry, and are willing to try out new urban solutions and initiatives that can enhance our living environment. If you recall, during COVID, we created a concept we call Alliance for Action – the public and private sectors, and academics, were coming together and piloting things. So success or failure, they are able to move things from the sandbox to a wider space.
For example, my colleagues at URA and HDB recently formalised the Courier Hub Scheme. This seeks to provide delivery personnel with a safe and convenient space to sort and handle parcels within HDB carparks. The genesis of this was really ground feedback. The disamenities were felt by residents, the stresses and tensions felt by the frontline workers, so we had to bring everyone together. What seemed like a ground issue could be solved by this sector of the economy. The benefits of a courier hub were demonstrated through agencies’ pilot in 2021 and 2022. We saw increased productivity and faster deliveries, benefiting both delivery riders and customers.
By partnering government agencies and the wider society, we can also work across disciplines, and better employ science and technology to gain new insight into issues.
For example, earlier this year, URA kickstarted a three-year study with NUS under MND’s Cities of Tomorrow R&D programme, to help us better understand and evaluate the influence of different housing typologies on the quality of life of seniors. Findings from this study will inform us and help our planners better plan and design future homes for our seniors.
I am also encouraged by the efforts of the Cooling Singapore team, comprising local and overseas experts from many institutions, such as Singapore-ETH Centre, SMU, NUS, Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology, also known as SMART, and Cambridge. They developed a Digital Urban Climate Twin by integrating various computational models on climate, traffic, and building emissions. By helping us understand how these factors interact at the micro and regional scales, the Digital Urban Climate Twin will inform the design of our built environment to tackle rising urban heat.
As we can see, such multi-disciplinary research is not a single agency or institution’s effort, but relies on the ‘brainwork’, goodwill and relationship between many experts from different disciplines.
I thank everyone here and the research communities for your very important contributions. Many of you have helped to advance our analytical capabilities to solve very complex issues. We will continue to work with you to push new frontiers in research and innovation, so that we can develop robust policies and plans for current and future generations.
CONCLUSION
On this note, allow me to conclude by thanking NUS Cities for organising this important Symposium. Let us continue our journey of grappling with complexity, planning for uncertainty, and ultimately, building a liveable city for all.
I wish everyone a fruitful Symposium. Thank you.