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ZONE 3: THE EMERGENT VILLAGE
MESSAGE FROM THE SPONSOR
TANG HSIAO LING
Ms Tang Hsiao Ling is the Director of JTC’s Urban Design and Architecture Division
As the lead agency in Singapore spearheading the planning, promotion and development of industrial land in the country, JTC Corporation (JTC) has played a major role in Singapore's economic development journey by developing industrial infrastructure that catalysed the growth of new industries and transformed existing enterprises. Since its inception in 1968, JTC has pioneered cutting-edge industrial infrastructure solutions to meet the fast-changing needs of companies with each phase of industrialisation. As Singapore’s economy transited through the labour-intensive, skills-intensive, capital-intensive, knowledge-intensive and innovation-driven phases from the 1960s until now, JTC has been at the forefront of innovating new land solutions and building space products to ensure a dynamic industrial ecosystem that continuously keeps pace with the evolving needs of the manufacturing landscape. In recent years, JTC has embarked on an initiative to Reimagine Singapore’s Industrial Landscape and has rolled out rejuvenation and redevelopment plans for its mature industrial estates to ensure they remain relevant in the evolving manufacturing landscape, create job centres that contribute towards economic advancement and further optimise land while creating sustainable and liveable work environments. As the Sungei Kadut Industrial Estate in the North Region was one of Singapore’s first industrial estates and played a major role in the growth of the manufacturing sector in the country, it has been identified as the first brownfield estate to be rejuvenated under this initiative. With the need to catalyse economic restructuring and industry transformation within the estate to ensure it meets the changing business needs of industrialists, the redevelopment also aims to contribute to Singapore’s decentralisation strategy by providing a new and exciting employment centre in the North Region. This would have the two-fold advantage of bringing jobs closer to homes and offering an array of amenities and recreational facilities to position the estate as a new lifestyle and leisure destination. Hence, we envision the rejuvenated estate as a mixed-use eco-district where economic and natural assets can be integrated and woven into the masterplan. The new Sungei Kadut Eco-District (SKED) is also envisaged as an Inclusive, Resilient, Generative and Beautiful next-generation industrial township that will seed, test-bed and spearhead the Circular Economy concept and lead the transformation of industries towards a more collaborative and innovative ecosystem amongst the existing Lifestyle and Construction and new Agri-Tech and Environmental Technology industry clusters. JTC and the National University of Singapore (NUS) have been actively collaborating on multiple planning and design research projects for almost a decade. With JTC’s extensive experience in industrial land and space development and the NUS’ multi-disciplinary expertise in the fields of architecture, design and engineering, this research collaboration has helped to trigger a vibrant industrial infrastructure research ecosystem through an industry-academia partnership. JTC was able to use this design research studio to cultivate industrial knowledge amongst the students and promote the relevance of industrial development and its contribution to Singapore’s economy. The workshops organised by the research team gave the students an in-depth understanding of circular economy concepts and industrial ecosystems. And with the guidance of research and industry experts, the students were able to develop creative ideas, innovative industrial infrastructure solutions and land optimisation strategies for the estate. The outcome of this design research studio has provided our planning team with new planning concepts that can be further explored and taken into consideration as we progressively develop the rejuvenation masterplan for the Sungei Kadut Eco-District. On behalf of JTC, we would like to express our appreciation to Dr Nirmal Kishnani, Dr Swinal Samant and their team at the NUS School of Design and Environment. Our thanks also goes to Wong Mun Summ and his team at WOHA for facilitating this design research studio and creating a platform that allowed students to contribute to the transformation of Sungei Kadut and formulate innovative, sustainable urban solutions for Singapore.
DESIGN AS RESEARCH: THE MSC ISD STUDIO
The programme focuses on Asian cities at the intersection between density and liveability, extrapolating this to questions of social equity and environmental risk and, in turn, examining the fractured relationship between human-made and natural systems. The overarching goal is to find ways to repair and regenerate, creating new wholes as opposed to merely fixing the parts. To achieve this, the programme's pedagogy is anchored in systems thinking, starting with the identification of biotic and abiotic systems that are essential for life, how human-made and natural systems interact, and how the flows and exchanges within and between systems might be shaped. In this way, design becomes research – a way of testing hypotheses in policy or science. The process produces new spatial structures and forms, arising from new ways of mapping and visualising flows. These conceptual and speculative ideas are then anchored to a dashboard of metrics that indicate how far to go. Key to the MSc ISD approach is the principle of dynamic spatial-temporal boundaries. The focus shifts from making objects to enhancing capabilities. An adaptable building, for instance, might have the capacity to expand or contract, change its use, manage a variance of loads, incorporate emergent technologies, and cope with climate risk. On an urban scale, adaptable systems have buffers to handle a surge or drop in demand. A circular flow of materials, for instance, needs room to stockpile and a capacity to repurpose. The question then is when and where, in spatial terms, these elements are integrated with other systems. The final pillar of the programme involves linking the architectural scale to the urban scale (and vice versa) on the understanding that neither one can sufficiently address the challenge in isolation. This multiscalar approach seeks a reciprocal relationship between the different parts and the whole.
MSC ISD TEAM
JANUARY—MAY 2019
RESEARCH AND PEDAGOGY School of Design and Environment, National University of Singapore Assoc. Prof. Nirmal Kishnani Prof .Wong Mun Summ Prof. Herbert Dreiseitl (by appointment) Assist Prof. Lau Siu Kit (part-time)
Workshop I Dr Ken Webster, Senior Lecturer, University of Exeter, United Kingdom Ms Sann Carrière, Director, So Now Asia
Workshop II Dr Anuj Jain, BirdLife International (Asia), Biomimicry Singapore Network, BioSEA
Studio Coordinator Ms Shefali Lal, WOHA
DESIGN Aleya Farah Sinthee Anjali Dutt Bhavya Hemant Gandhi Brown Christina Xing Yizhen Harsh Vardhan Ivan Beliaev Jaclyn Alexandra Marie Javier Brillantes Jhanvi Yogesh Sanghvi Joan Santos De Leon @ Joan De Leon Tabinas Manikkar Karthik Shanbhogue Megha Jagdish Bilgi Natasha Kumar Nitika Agarwal Qin Shuxu Rajiv Tewari Samhita Giridhar Kotian Samyuktha Badrinarayanan Shreya Khandelwal Siddharth Babbar Stuti Jain Supratim Sengupta Thean Amirtha Varshini Tyagarajan Vidushi Nigam
January—May 2020
RESEARCH AND PEDAGOGY School of Design and Environment, National University of Singapore Assoc. Prof. Nirmal Kishnani Dr Swinal Samant Prof. Wong Mun Summ Prof. Herbert Dreiseitl (by appointment) Dr Anuj Jain (by appointment)
Faculty of Engineering, National University of Singapore Prof. Seeram Ramakrishna
Workshop I Dr Ken Webster, Senior Lecturer, University of Exeter, United Kingdom
Workshop II Dr Anuj Jain, BirdLife International (Asia), Biomimicry Singapore Network, BioSEA
Studio Coordinator Ms Jhanvi Sanghvi, WOHA
DESIGN Anisha Malhotra Celine Rachel Tan Mae Tsze Elizabeth Eapen Evian Putra Setiawan Guo Bisheng Huang Jianqiao Liu Xingben Maitreyee Milind Fadnavis Pranoti Venkateshan Ramilo Runddy Dacallos Sirija Mandava Syed Mehdi Raza Tanya Talwar Varsha Bhaskar Kolur Wang Haiming Wang Jiatong Yang Yang Yao Yumo Yash Kishore Malani
BIBLIOGRAPHY
pp. 6–7 1 : https://datatopics.worldbank.org/what-a-waste/trends_in_solid_ waste_management.html 2 : https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/immersive-story/2018/09/20/ what-a-waste-an-updated-look-into-the-future-of-solid-wastemanagement 3 : Dieguez, T. (2020). “Operationalization of Circular Economy: A Conceptual Model.” Handbook of Research on Entrepreneurship Development and Opportunities in Circular Economy. p.23. 4 : https://www.ellenmacarthurfoundation.org/circular-economy/ concept
pp. 10–13 5 : https://mcdonoughpartners.com/projects/park-2020-master-plan/ 6 : See, for example, https://www.towardszerowaste.gov.sg/zero- waste-masterplan/
pp. 14–16 7 : https://www.greenplan.gov.sg 8 : https://www.towardszero-waste.gov.sg/zero-waste-masterplan/ https://www.towardszero-waste.gov.sg/recycle/ 9 : https://www.nea.gov.sg/our-services/waste-management/waste- statistics-and-overall-recycling 10 : Seeram R. (2021). “Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) Technologies for Progress in UN SDGs”, United Nations Asian and Pacific Centre for Transfer of Technology (APCTT) - Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP), April-June. https:// www.apctt.org/techmonitor/fourth-industrial-revolution-technologies-inclusive-and-sustainable-development-0
pp. 92–94 11 : Arup (2016). The Circular Economy in the Built Environment. London: Arup; Brand, Stewart. (1994). How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They’re Built. New York: Penguin Books. 12 : Arup; Ellen Macarthur Foundation. (2018). From Principles to Practice: First Steps Towards A Circular Built Environment. 13 : Arup & Ellen Macarthur Foundation (2019). Urban Buildings System Summary; Planning for Compact, Connected Cities; Designing Buildings for Adaptable Use, Durability, and Positive Impact; Making Buildings with New Techniques that Eliminate Waste and Support Material Cycles; Accessing and Using Residential and Commercial Space Differently; Operating and Maintaining Buildings for Maximum, Regenerative Performance. 14: United Nations (2020). A Guide To Circular Cities. Switzerland Geneva: United for Smart Sustainable Cities (U4SSC) initiative. 15 : Circle Economy, TNO & FABRIC. (n.d.). Amsterdam Circular Strategy 2020-2025. Amsterdam. 16 : RAU architects. (n.d.). Triodos Bank, Netherlands. Retrieved from https://www.rau.eu/portfolio/triodos-bank-nederland/ 17 : Arup (n.d.), People’s Pavilion, Eindhoven. Retrieved from Circular Pavilion Borrows From - And Returns - Materials To Local Suppliers: https://www.arup.com/projects/peoples-pavilion pp. 106–111 18 : Calthorpe, P. (1993). The Next American Metropolis: Ecology, Community and the American Dream. New York: Princeton Architectural Press. 19 : Mees, P. (2014). “TOD and Multi-modal Public Transport.” Planning Practice and Research, 29(5), 461–470. https://doi.org/10.1080/02 697459.2014.977633 20 : Tamakloe, R., and Hong, J. (2020). “Assessing the efficiency of integrated public transit stations based on the concept of transit-oriented development.” Transportmetrica A: Transport Science, 16(3), 1459–1489. https://doi.org/10.1080/23249935.2020.1753849 21 : Xue, C.Q., Ma, L., & Hui, K.C. (2012). “Indoor ‘Public’ Space: A study of atria in mass transit railway (MTR) complexes of Hong Kong.” URBAN DESIGN International, 17(2), 87–105. https://doi.org/10.1057/udi.2012.6 22 : Madanipour, A. (2003). Public and Private Spaces of the City. London; New York: Routledge. 23 : Pimlott, M. (2008) “The Continuous Interior: Infrastructure for Publicity and Control.” Harvard Design Magazine, 29, 75–86; Cho, I. S., Trivic, Z., & Nasution, I. (2015). “Towards an Integrated Urban Space Framework for Emerging Urban Conditions in a High-density Context.” Journal of Urban Design, 20(2), 147–168. https://doi. org/10.1080/13574809.2015. 24 : Rotmeyer, J. (2006). “Can elevated pedestrian walkways be sustainable? WIT Transactions on Ecology and the Environment.” Southampton, Vol. 93, Southampton: W I T Press. doi:10.2495/SC060281 25 : Humphreys, E. (2020). “How to Make a Tall Building Drone Ready.” CTBUH Journal, Issue 2. 26 : Ibid. 27 : Mills, F. (2017). “What are Horizontal Elevators?” The B1M, Accessed: May 19, 2020. https://www.theb1m.com/video/what-arehorizontal-elevators (August, 2017). 1009009
pp. 120–125 28 : United Nations (2019). “Population Division.” World Population Prospects, 2019 Revision (Medium Variant). 29 : Anuj Jain LLP & BioSEA LLP (2018). Kampung Admiralty Biodiversity, Social & Ecosystem Services Audit. 30 : Bingham-Hall, P. and WOHA (2016). Garden City Mega City, Rethinking Cities for the Age of Global Warming. Sidney: Pesaro Publishing, pp. 284-293. 31 : Braungart, M. and McDonough, W. (2002) Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things. New York: North Point Press.
pp. 136–141 32 : Hwang, Y.H. & Jain, A. (2021). “Landscape design approaches to enhance human-wildlife interactions in a compact tropical city.” Journal of Urban Ecology 1 - 10. doi: 10.1093/jue/juab007 33 : Banerd, H., Kishnani, N. & Jain, A. (2018). “Urban Greening and Architectural Form: A Bird’s Eye View.” FuturArc, 61. 34 : https://www.esiitool.com/ 35 : Vas, E., Lescroel, A., Duriez, O., Boguszewski, G. & Gremillet, D. (2015). “Approaching birds with drones: first experiments and ethical guidelines.” Biology Letters, 11: 20140754. 36 : Campbell, S. (1996). “Green Cities, Growing Cities, Just Cities? Urban Planning and the Contradictions of Sustainable Development.” Journal of the American Planning Association, 62 (3), 296–312.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This book would not have been possible without the help of many who gave their time and lent moral and financial support. Although all deserve mention, we can but highlight a few here, starting with Prof Dr Lam Khee Poh (Dean, School of Design and Environment), and Prof Dr Ho Puay Peng (Head, Department of Architecture), during whose tenure this work was carried out.
Credit for initiating the research goes to the JTC Corporation who sponsored the studios and offered us the context of the Sungei Kadut industrial estate – an actual site earmarked for future development in Singapore. Within JTC, we must single out several individuals who encouraged and facilitated this collaboration between industry and academia: Josephine Loke, Tang Hsiao Ling, Aloysius Iwan Handono, Chaerin Jin, Riya Nichani, Nguyen Huang Doc Duy, and Bij Borja.
To carry out the study, we enlisted the help of numerous experts who taught alongside us and later contributed to this book, including Dr Ken Webster, Prof Dr Seeram Ramakrishna, Dr Anuj Jain, and Herbert Dreiseitl. Two of the programme’s alumni, Jhanvi Sanghvi and Shefali Lal, helped us manage the studios and curate materials for publication. They were later assisted by Jocelyn Lam Ying Ju and Ann Mathew. Guo Bisheng and Yang Yang worked on several key visuals for the future masterplan; Lim Weixiang delivered high-quality images of the present Sungei Kadut. All these disparate elements were then brought together by the gifted David Lorente and Tomoko Sakamoto, who were responsible for the book’s design.
Lastly, the students who participated in the studios infused the process with immeasurable curiosity and enthusiasm, without which we would have none of the many thought-provoking ideas that are contained herein.
Nirmal Kishnani is an Associate Professor at the National University of Singapore’s School of Design and Environment. He is co-Programme Director of the Master of Science, Integrated Sustainable Design, where, over the past decade, he has pioneered a pedagogy based on systems thinking and regenerative design. For more than twenty years, Dr Kishnani has been an advocate of sustainable design, advising on projects and policies in Asia, formulating new platforms and scrutinising the space between front-line theories and drawing board pragmatism. As editor-in-chief of FuturArc magazine (2008-2021), he championed thought leaders in the field of design and made a case for a design approach specifically tailored to the Asian context. His books Greening Asia: Emerging Principles for Sustainable Architecture (2012) and Ecopuncture: Transforming Architecture and Urbanism in Asia (2019) argue for upstream imagination over downstream mitigation, advocating new methods and frameworks.
Wong Mun Summ co-founded the Singapore-based architectural practice WOHA in 1994. He is a Professor in Practice at the National University of Singapore’s Department of Architecture. He sits on the Nominating Committee for the Lee Kuan Yew World City Prize and other design advisory panels in Singapore. The WOHA practice works at all scales, from interiors and architecture to public spaces and masterplans; their projects are living systems that connect to the city as a whole. With every project, the practice aims to create a matrix of interconnected human-scaled environments. These spaces foster community, enable stewardship of nature, generate biophilic beauty, activate ecosystem services and build resilience. It has accrued a varied portfolio of work and applies its systems thinking approach to architecture and urbanism in its building design and regenerative masterplans. The practice currently has projects under construction in Singapore, Australia, China and other countries in South Asia.
Swinal Samant is a Senior Lecturer and co-Programme Director for the Master of Science, Integrated Sustainable Design Programme at the National University of Singapore. Prior to her move to Singapore, Swinal was an Associate Professor at the University of Nottingham, UK. Dr Samant has a rich and diverse teaching and research experience centred on environmental sustainability in the context of global architectural and urban dimensions. Her research on ‘Building Science’ and ‘Urban Design’ has resulted in several peer-reviewed publications (a book, chapters and journal articles), editorial refereeing and board memberships for international journals and conferences, funding, guest lecturer invitations and advisory roles, including her involvement in various capacities with the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitats. Her more recent and ongoing empirical research critiques tall buildings, transit-oriented developments, and stratified urban spaces and their contribution to vertical urbanism. The pathway to a circular city is unclear. The making of urban and architectural form, as practised today, does not lend itself to the creation of closed-loop systems, nor does it offer a critique of the linear economy, which, in many ways, is a social and economic construct. This book attempts to bridge this gap by framing circularity as the realignment and redistribution of urban systems, and testing it, hypothetically, on Sungei Kadut, an industrial estate in the city of Singapore, which, at the time of this publication, was in the early stages of redevelopment. Sungei Kadut is touted as a prototype for a new generation of industrial estates and a testbed for the city’s zero-waste policy, which seeks to bridge gaps between SUNGEI KADUT MASTERPLAN procurement, consumption and waste management. These gaps are examined from a spatial perspective, opening up questions around the adjacency, connectivity and embeddedness of systems, which leads to solutions that envisage juxtaposition of manufacturing and consumption, the co-location of work and home, the integration of the humanmade and natural, the layering of logistics and technology, and the distribution of public space and mobility networks. Fundamentally, it has compelled a rethink of the way the city is organised, how density is distributed and how programmes – once grouped in hard-edged, mono-functional zones – are arranged to harness synergies and close resource loops. This quest for the symbiotic, layered and multifunctional – arguably, the hallmarks of a circular economy – points to new architectural typologies and urban morphologies.
A FACTORY IN A FOREST AN INDUSTRIAL INCUBATOR THE EMERGENT VILLAGE
If waste is no longer wasted (so to speak), and if the resources and materials that go into, and through, buildings and neighbourhoods have multiple lives, what will this imply for the way we plan human settlements and, importantly, how will this resolve the troubled relationship between human-made and natural systems? The speculative solutions proposed in this book go some way to answering these questions.
ISBN: 978-981-18-2642-9
The pathway to a circular city is unclear. The making of urban and architectural form, as practised today, does not lend itself to the creation of closed-loop systems, nor does it offer a critique of the linear economy, which, in many ways, is a social and economic construct. This book attempts to bridge this gap by framing circularity as the realignment and redistribution of urban systems, and testing it, hypothetically, on Sungei Kadut, an industrial estate in the city of Singapore, which, at the time of this publication, was in the early stages of redevelopment. Sungei Kadut is touted as a prototype for a new generation of industrial estates and a testbed for the city’s zero-waste policy, which seeks to bridge gaps between SUNGEI KADUT MASTERPLAN procurement, consumption and waste management. These gaps are examined from a spatial perspective, opening up questions around the adjacency, connectivity and embeddedness of systems, which leads to solutions that envisage juxtaposition of manufacturing and consumption, the co-location of work and home, the integration of the humanmade and natural, the layering of logistics and technology, and the distribution of public space and mobility networks. Fundamentally, it has compelled a rethink of the way the city is organised, how density is distributed and how programmes – once grouped in hard-edged, mono-functional zones – are arranged to harness synergies and close resource loops. This quest for the symbiotic, layered and multifunctional – arguably, the hallmarks of a circular economy – points to new architectural typologies and urban morphologies.
A FACTORY IN A FOREST AN INDUSTRIAL INCUBATOR THE EMERGENT VILLAGE
If waste is no longer wasted (so to speak), and if the resources and materials that go into, and through, buildings and neighbourhoods have multiple lives, what will this imply for the way we plan human settlements and, importantly, how will this resolve the troubled relationship between human-made and natural systems? The speculative solutions proposed in this book go some way to answering these questions.
ISBN: 978-981-18-2642-9
