Speech by SMS Desmond Lee at the Launch of URA's Urban Planning Festival and Cube Award Ceremony
Apr 26, 2016
I am very pleased to be here to launch the Urban Planning Festival as well as an exhibition showcasing student projects under URA’s Challenge for the Urban and Built Environment Workshop 2015 (or the CUBE Workshop).
Young People in Urban Planning
As a very small, but highly dense city-state, Singapore’s physical transformation over the last few decades has been remarkable. We have this City in a Garden today, because of very careful and thorough planning by our planners and our agencies in close partnership with the community, and a forward looking outlook that looks towards the future.
This broad approach - of careful and comprehensive planning of our city’s rejuvenation and a forward looking attitude - needs to be carried on from generation to generation, so that our City remains vibrant and liveable, and so that Singapore continues to remain exceptional and endearing.
It is therefore critical that URA reaches out to excite, engage and energise all of you, our younger generation of Singaporeans. This is because we are custodians of this City for you, and you will, in turn, be stewards of our urban landscape for generations that come after you.
For more than a decade, URA has been working closely with schools and educators to nurture young people and encourage you to imagine new ways to make our city even better. The natural starting point must be for us to learn about our city’s unique circumstances, as well as our challenges and our opportunities. URA therefore has a range of educational resources for you to know more about our land-use planning.
These include the Singapore City Gallery, which is right here at URA Centre, showcasing our planning considerations. It is visited each year by more than 20,000 students. We also have various workshops, talks, activities, publications on land-use planning and conservation. These allow us to learn how our physical environment impacts our everyday lives.
We can find out the various considerations that our planners need to grapple with and to take into account to design sustainable places for people to live, work and play. We can also experience real challenges faced by planners here in Singapore, by being exposed to real life and current case studies. When we know more about how Singapore is designed and planned, and how much effort it takes to make thing work, how to bring different interests and different considerations together, how to design estates so people can live side by side harmoniously - our sense of identity, of purpose, of what it is to be Singaporean - can grow stronger.
Urban Planning Festival
Now what can our students from Secondary Schools, JCs and Polytechnics look forward to during this year’s Urban Planning Festival? This week, you will be immersed in specially curated activities focused on various aspects of urban planning and design. You will also learn techniques on model-making, and express your very own perspectives of Singapore’s cityscape through the medium of art.
As a young person, you are naturally curious and inquisitive, have a lot of drive and energy, and brimming with ideas. We hope to fire up your imagination even more in designing our City, your City, and inspire you to get more deeply involved in improving the quality of our living environment.
Let’s just take one example. There is this project entitled “Documenting Serangoon Road” – which is a collaboration with youth development programme – the National Youth Achievement Award (NYAA) – a group of young, talented photographers captured the charm of Serangoon Road at different times of year, over the course of an entire year. These photographers were encouraged to freely explore various themes of community and architecture, and to experience and learn more about this historic district.
Cube Workshop Exhibition
Apart from the Urban Planning Festival, we also have the CUBE Workshop exhibition to showcase work that our students did last year. CUBE brought students and industry professionals together to exchange ideas and experiences. So one generation mentoring the next.
Under the guidance of architects from various firms as well as students from NUS School of Design and Architecture, our Pre-U students played the role of City planners for several days.
We were in your hands. You worked on real sites, not imaginary ones, and you experienced the entire spectrum of urban planning work. Last year, I understand you were challenged to create alternatives for businesses to shift from City Centre to Paya Lebar Central, and provide job opportunities closer to home. This builds on the theme of moving things out of the city into the suburban areas, to provide jobs closer to home. Also, in the longer term, the Paya Lebar airport will move, and that becomes almost a blank sheet from which planners can develop a whole new estate, a whole new liveable place for people.
During that four day workshop, I was told you walked the ground, you gathered community sentiments, you crunched data and analysed it, and you brainstormed concepts and solutions amongst yourselves and with professionals.
So I congratulate you for the ideas that you will be showcasing later at the exhibition. I’m sure all of us look forward to seeing your fascinating and innovative ideas; asking you difficult questions and seeing you flourish in your answers.
Congratulations to all our participants. I hope the participants of the Urban Planning Festival will enjoy being planners for a couple of days, and get a better feel of how challenging and exciting it is to make this City special, and make this City our home.
Thank you.