Speech by Minister Lawrence Wong at Imagine Singapore: In Search of New Ground

Apr 25, 2019

I am very happy to join you this afternoon for this conference on “Imagine Singapore” in 2060, and especially to discuss our never ceasing quest for more space in Singapore.

No one can predict what Singapore will be like in 2060.  

Some people say you must know your past in order to make sense of your future.  

2019 is our Bicentennial Year – it is 200 years since the arrival of the British, and of course the history of Singapore goes back further to the 14th century.

Throughout this long arc of history, we’ve gone through many ups and downs; we’ve seen the rise and fall of empires; we’ve experienced depression and war.  Fortunately, we’ve done well in the last 50 years since independence. It’s what some call the Singapore miracle. The challenge for all of us is how to keep this miracle going for as long as we can, despite our being just a little red dot in a big uncertain world.  

Land is a key factor in any country’s development.  That’s why we are always looking for ways to overcome our space constraints to provide more strategic options for our future, and to maximise our chances of continued success. 

Long-term Planning and Optimising Land Use

So how do we go about this endeavour – to overcome our space constraints in Singapore? Our first strategy is to optimise land use through good long-term urban planning. 

It sounds like a straightforward matter, but it is not so easy to do.

Unlike other cities, Singapore is both a city and a country. We have to deliberately safeguard land for our social and recreational needs that would otherwise be priced out by commercial uses. That’s why we made a strategic choice at the very start to be Garden City and a City in a Garden, so that there will be open green spaces for all to enjoy.  

We are doubling down on this green strategy. Today, our green spaces – nature reserves, nature areas, parks and park connectors – account for about 7800 ha of land. Over the next 10 to 15 years, we are increasing this by about 1000 ha. Despite urbanisation and development, we are not cutting back on greenery; we are increasing our greenery. We are doing this not in an ad-hoc fashion, but deliberately and systematically. For example, the central catchment area, is where we have very rich native flora and fauna; so, we are adding nature parks around the central catchment because they serve as buffer green spaces to protect this native flora and fauna. All of our green spaces will be linked together by over 400 km of park connectors. The major green recreational corridors will include: Coast to Coast Trail – which is ready now. It links the west in Jurong all the way to Coney Island in the east, and is 36km long; we have the Rail Corridor that runs North-South, and is 24km long. This will be accessible in two years’ time and you can go from Woodlands in the North all the way down to Tanjong Pagar; if you go up and down, you can do more than a marathon; if you are up for it, you can go beyond that to the Round Island Route – 150km long, and you can do one round across the whole of Singapore.

Besides these green spaces, we have land that’s used for a range of different purposes, be it residential, commercial or industrial. Our planning rules seek to facilitate the recycling and redevelopment of such land to optimise its use and to meet new needs, so that our city continues to be rejuvenated and refreshed. That is the major advantage of having land on leasehold basis. So when the leases expire, we can phase out uses that are less relevant, and we can allow new, higher-value developments to happen, to better optimise existing land and to create new opportunities for changing needs and lifestyles. All cities in the world do this - renewal, rejuvenation, recycling of land - but I would say this happens to a far greater intensity in Singapore than in most other cities.

One good example of this is the port terminal land in Tanjong Pagar and Pasir Panjang. The terminals sit on prime land in the city, and when the leases expire, we are moving them to the Western part of Singapore where we are building a new Tuas Terminal. This will free up 1,000 ha of space in the city. There are also non-port areas around this waterfront, like the Pasir Panjang Power District, Keppel golf club and Sentosa. Altogether that is another 1,000 ha of space. If you take the whole waterfront space and combine that together, it is 2,000ha – six times the size of Marina Bay today. This gives you a sense of the many possibilities that we can imagine as we extend the city from Marina Bay all the way to building a new Southern Waterfront City.

As we build new facilities and infrastructure, we also look at different ways to co-locate and integrate them to better optimise space. I will give you some examples. In the East Coast, we are building an integrated depot. This co-locates three MRT depots – one existing one for the East-West Line, another for the new Thomson-East Coast Line, and yet another for the Downtown Line. We are integrating three depots into one, including a bus depot. Altogether we will save 44 hectares – that amounts about 60 football fields of land. Nothing to sniff at, particularly in land scarce Singapore. In the Northern part of Singapore, we have a new HDB development called Kampung Admiralty. This integrates public housing for seniors with a wide range of communal, commercial, social and healthcare facilities. All integrated into one precinct. It is especially important for Singapore because we are facing a rapidly ageing population – we have to start planning ahead for the infrastructure needs of this ageing population. With an integrated development like this, seniors can age in place, they can live independently where they are, and enjoy convenient access to a wide range of services right at their doorstop. So this gives a sense of a potential typology that we can scale through the rest of Singapore to accommodate the needs of an ageing population.

Creating New Spaces – Upward, Downward, Seaward

Besides relocation and redevelopment to optimise existing land; we can also create new spaces.  We can do this in three ways, we can go upward, we can go downward and we can extend seaward. I will be elaborate on each of them.

Let me start by going upward. We are already used to high-rise living in Singapore. But there are many places where we have not yet maximised our full potential. Take the example of Paya Lebar Airbase today. The airbase is located near urbanised areas and imposes height restrictions on the buildings around it.  So the HDB blocks in the towns around Paya Lebar, such as Serangoon, Hougang, Sengkang and Punggol, they are only about 10-20 storeys high, whereas in other places you could have 30-40 storeys. We are relocating airbase to Tengah and Changi, which are relatively less built up areas. The footprint of the airbase itself is 800 ha– that is about the size of Bishan town, one of our HDB towns. But we can also redevelop the surrounding industrial areas next to the airbase. That gives us a redevelopment footprint of 2.5 times the size of Bishan town. But even that is an underestimate – because we are removing the height restrictions. When we remove the height restrictions in this area, we can unlock a lot more development potential for the whole area – we can build higher, not just in Paya Lebar, but extend that all the way to Marina South, to provide more homes, offices and retail spaces in the central, eastern and southern parts of Singapore.

This strategy of going “upward” has many other applications. We can make better use of our rooftop spaces. We have always lamented in Singapore that we have constraints in harnessing renewable energy, particularly solar power – because we do not have enough land to build big solar farms. So we are deploying solar panels on rooftops. By next year, half of all HDB blocks will have solar panels on their rooftops installed or in the midst of installation. Some people then ask me, why only half, and not 100 per cent. The simple answer is that we have done a map of all HDB buildings, and obviously some are low and some are high, and if you have a low building that is blocked by an adjacent higher building, then you may not get so much solar exposure on the rooftop and it doesn’t make sense to put a solar panel on that rooftop. We have done that mapping of all the HDB buildings, and we think that half of them will benefit from the deployment of solar panels. Of course as technology evolves, we can go beyond putting solar panels on rooftop spaces. There are new technologies now like perovskite solar cells – thin film liquid cells that can be applied on vertical spaces, on windows, that can harness solar power. If you look at any building, there is obviously more vertical space than horizontal space. If that technology proves viable in the future, you can imagine us harnessing a lot more solar power, not just on rooftops but even on the vertical spaces of buildings. Solar is one application, but we can also use the vertical strategy for gardens and urban farming. In Singapore we do not have space for large traditional agriculture farms, clearly. But we can go into vertical farming and harness new high-tech farming methods which require less land and in fact, are far more productive than traditional methods.  One such company Sky Greens produces 10 times more vegetable per unit area of land compared to traditional farms. Since Sky Greens started, many other vertical farms have also started establishing themselves in Singapore. That’s how we think we can achieve our target of producing 30 per cent of our food needs locally by 2030. It is a high target given our size of land, but with new, vertical, modern farming, we think we would be able to reach this target, and it can help us strengthen our food security. We will still need to import a lot of our food, but then we will have a balance of 30 per cent of that food produced locally. That is our vertical strategy.

Our second strategy is to go downwards or underground.  

We’ve been using underground space for some time, but there’s still much more that we can do.

For example, we have underground MRT tunnels; we are now studying to see if it is possible to co-locate utility lines in these tunnels.

We have underground District Cooling System, and Deep Tunnel Sewerage System in Singapore; we are now studying if it’s feasible to use underground space for drainage and water storage – literally an underground reservoir.

These are all ideas that need to be studied; some may be more challenging technically; others may not be so cost effective so we may not implement them immediately – we may do it later, but there are already some concrete proposals for underground utilities which we are pursuing. I shared just now about the Southern Waterfront, and I said there is a Pasir Panjang Power District in the waterfront. That is an old power station, but there are existing substations there. A 230kV substation will be pushed underground, and that will free up prime land for new commercial developments. Eventually, we can do that across the area, and also out to the waterfront, and the entire area can be rejuvenated as our Greater Southern Waterfront development.

I have talked about MRT tunnels, different underground developments - many of them reach up to 40m in depth. But even with the underground strategy we can go deeper. We have underground caverns in Jurong which we use for oil storage. These caverns go up to 150m underground – literally about 40 storeys underground, because they need to be built with good solid rock. We are now identifying and safeguarding suitable locations for future cavern developments. This has to be done based on geology and compatibility with surface land uses. A lot of the possibilities are mainly on the western side of Singapore. We have an existing cavern in Jurong; there are four other possible cavern areas at Jurong West, Gali Batu, Tanjong Kling and Kent Ridge Hill. These are currently being studied and we will consider utility, industrial and storage facilities that can be housed in these caverns.

For the first time this year we are putting all of these underground plans together into an Underground Space Plan. We have always had masterplans for Singapore, but we have always focussed on above ground. The underground plan shows what is already there in the ground, what we plan to build in the future, and the regulations and requirements for industry. So we can do all of this in a holistic and systematic manner, we can safeguard underground space for future use, and also plan coherently for both aboveground and underground possibilities, to ensure that they are compatible and seamless. We are starting these underground plans with three areas – in Punggol, Jurong and Marina Bay, but that is a start and we will expand the Underground Space Plan to include more areas in the future. 

Finally, we can create more space by extending seaward.

We can have floating platforms on the sea. Many possible applications to consider with floating platforms. One immediate application is to have offshore solar panels. We are already embarking on one project – this is offshore, north of Woodlands. It is potentially one of the world’s largest sea-based floating solar PV systems. It allows us to harness more solar energy.

We can also make better use of sea space for deep sea fish farming. For example, there is a company called Barramundi Asia that has a deep sea aquaculture farm, located in the south of Singapore off Pulau Semakau. 

Of course, we can always create space also through reclamation, as we have done before.  

Reclamation is important for another reason – the threat of rising levels due to climate change. According to published projections by the UN panel, if global emissions continue on their current trajectory uncurbed, sea levels could rise by around 1 metre in 2100. Even if countries pursue all the measures committed under the Paris Agreement – that is a big if, but even if that were to happen, sea levels are still going to rise, perhaps at a lower level of around 0.7m. That is little comfort if you are a low-lying island like Singapore surrounded by water. There are many uncertainties surrounding these projections. But there are more downside risks than upside. For example, if the Antarctic ice sheet melts faster than expect, the sea level would rise would be far more dramatic and it may well happen earlier – causing significant global impact by 2050.  So when we imagine Singapore in 2060 – a scenario we must surely contemplate is one where we are inundated by rising sea levels. It’s a real existential threat.  

We have already started preparing for this. We have raised the reclamation levels in Singapore by an additional 1 m. Each time we do a reclamation project, we are building up to 2.25m above the highest recorded sea level. We are building up our coastline each time with a reclamation project to a higher level and strengthening our defences against rising sea levels.  

Reclamation though has its limits – it’s costly and requires a lot of sand. So we cannot rely only on the traditional way of reclaiming land, and we need other strategies. That is why we have embarked on a polder project in Pulau Tekong. A polder is simply reclaimed land but low-lying reclaimed land, so we do not fill it up so much, and you protect it with a sea wall and pumping stations. The Dutch are experts at it, and we are learning from them. This polder project in Pulau Tekong will create space the size of two Toa Payoh towns. It will allow more space for the SAF for military training, and in return, we can free up space within Singapore itself for other things, including a new housing town called Tengah, which is being developed now. Such a polder project requires about 40 per cent less sand compared to traditional reclamation. It is a technology which we are applying, and potentially can be extended to other parts of Singapore.

Besides reclaiming - be it through the traditional method or through polders - we will have to consider other infrastructure to protect against rising sea levels. It may include sea walls, dykes or pumping stations. These are long-term investments. But we are planning well ahead. If fact we are looking at this thoroughly now, and we intend to put in place the necessary protective measures within the next 20-30 years.

Technology as A Key Enabler

I have touched on different strategies, upwards, downwards, seawards and how we think about planning and designing our future city. But we cannot just extrapolate solutions from what we know today. Science and Technology are rapidly advancing and there is tremendous potential for new breakthroughs and new solutions. 

Technology, of course, is a buzz word these days, and you hear a lot about disruptive technology in Finance you have FinTech; even in food you have Agri-Tech.

But there’s also the rise of Urban Tech, and that is attracting a significant share of global venture capital investments. It reflects the growing role of cities and urbanism in the global economy. That is changing the way we think about cities and urban living. Who knows, because we are talking about 2060, but in the years and decades to come we may have new forms of mobility, with drones, autonomous vehicles, and even air-taxis. We will have new ways of construction, new ways of managing buildings with sensors, and with infrastructure that are greener, smarter and more efficient. Potentially, dramatic transformation can happen.  

This is why we are investing in R&D in a wide range of urban solutions. We are working with our research institutions, with corporate partners, and putting in significant R&D investments into urban solutions. Part of this is to tackle existential threats like global warming and food security, but it is also to create new versions of urban living that will be more fulfilling and sustainable than before. These new prototypes can be progressively test-bedded, piloted and then scaled up as we progressively remake and redevelop our city.
  
Conclusion

To conclude, space will always be a constraint in our little island.

But through human ingenuity, we can come up with innovative ways to overcome our space constraints – by optimising land use; by going upwards, downwards and seawards. 

Why are we doing all this? Some people will ask – do we need all that space? I have to go back to what I said at the start of my speech. No one can predict what 2060 will be like, we can imagine all sort of things in 2060. The point is, the future is uncertain but we already know some of the big forces at work and the challenges we will face. That is not uncertain.  There are inexorable forces that are at work - technology, globalisation, climate change, ageing – these are challenges that will be posed to Singapore and to all cities around the world. So we have to anticipate and prepare ahead, and we have to build capabilities now to respond to different scenarios.  

In some ways it helps to think of cities as living organisms in a natural eco-system. If you are in that natural eco-system, then competition is intense and it is all about survival of the fittest. That is the same for cities. We either adapt and grow; or we stagnate and perish. 

Ultimately, that’s the aim of our long-term plans. It is to maximise the physical and strategic space for Singapore in the future. This goes beyond just having more space to build taller and bigger buildings. It is really to build a city that upholds who we are as a people – our values and our spirit, a city that we can be proud of. That is the work that we are doing. It is a collective endeavour to build a beautiful, sustainable city that endures for generations; to build for a better Singapore in 2060 and beyond. Thank you very much.