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In a country where more than 80% of residents live in public housing, a government commitment to sustainable urban design could have huge implications.
And when it’s a tropical country where convenience and air conditioning are a way of life, the impact could be even greater.
Promising 42,000 new homes in five residential neighborhoods, the eco-city of Tengah – the Malay word for ‘middle’, despite being in the western region of the island – will be the 24th new settlement built by the government of Singapore since WWII.
It is, however, the first with centralized cooling, automated waste collection and a car-free city center, which conservationists hope offers a roadmap to reducing carbon emissions in the city. -state of Southeast Asia.
The development is nicknamed a “forest town” by the authorities because of its lush greenery and public gardens. Once home to brick factories and then used for military training, the 700-hectare (2.7-square-mile) site has been reclaimed by extensive secondary forest in recent years.
A 328-foot-wide ecological “corridor” will be maintained through its center, providing safe passage for wildlife and connecting a watershed on one side to a nature reserve on the other.
The project has proven to be a tabula rasa for city planners advocating green design principles and “smart” technology, according to Chong Fook Loong, director of the research and planning group at Singapore Housing and Development Board (HDB) , the agency that oversees the country’s public housing.
“Tengah is a clean slate,” he said in a video interview, explaining that roads, parking lots and utilities are pushed under the city center.
“We go for the ideal concept of traffic segregation, (with) everything underground and then the ground level completely clear for pedestrians – for people. It is therefore a very safe environment for everyone.
“We want a city that allows walking and cycling in a very friendly way,” he added, saying cycling has “taken off” in Singapore for “the past three to five years in particular.
The master plan will see the installation of electric vehicle charging stations, while the streets are also “future-proof” to accommodate emerging technologies, Chong said.
“When we planned the road network, we envisioned a future where autonomous vehicles and autonomous vehicles would become a reality,” he said.
Chiller by design
Although relatively small, with a population of less than 6 million, Singapore’s per capita emissions are higher than those of the UK, China and neighboring Malaysia, according to the National Climate Change Secretariat of country.
This is in part due to air conditioning, which accounts for more than a third of typical household energy consumption. Global warming will only exacerbate this dependence. The Singapore Meteorological Service (MSS) predicted that by the end of this century, average daily temperatures in the city-state could be at least 34.1 degrees Celsius (93.4 degrees Fahrenheit) “almost every day. days’ during the hottest eight months of the year.
As such, keeping one’s cool will be increasingly a necessity for residents. Rather than demonizing air conditioning, Tengah planners have instead sought to reinvent it. Cold, solar-cooled water will be piped to homes in the neighborhood, meaning residents don’t need to install inefficient outdoor air conditioning condensers (although they can still control the temperature. in their own apartments).
According to the city’s energy supplier, SG Group, this will generate carbon dioxide savings equivalent to taking 4,500 cars off the road each year.
The state-owned energy company reports that, among apartments already sold in advance, 9 out of 10 future residents have signed up for central cooling. Planners used computer modeling to simulate wind flow and heat gain in the city. , thus helping to reduce the so-called urban heat island effect (whereby human activities and structures make urban areas significantly warmer than the surrounding nature).
Elsewhere, “smart” lights will turn off when public spaces are unoccupied, and waste will be stored centrally, with monitors detecting when waste needs to be collected.
“Instead of using a truck to pick up the garbage from each block, we will suck all the garbage through the pneumatic system to a chamber that serves multiple blocks,” Chong said.
“Every now and then the truck (garbage can) just needs to collect in the room.”
Of the 42,000 housing units built in Tengah, more than 70% will be made available through HDB on long-term leases. Prices for two-bedroom apartments currently start at just Singapore $ 108,000 ($ 82,000), with the first apartments scheduled for completion in 2023.
All residents will have access to an application allowing them to monitor their energy and water consumption. (“You empower them to take control of where they can reduce their energy use,” Chong said.) The digital screens in each block will inform occupants of their collective environmental impact, which could even encourage competition between residential blocks, according to SG Groupe.
Whether or not the use of smart technology can dramatically reduce greenhouse gas emissions, involving residents in their own consumption could trigger behavior change, according to Perrine Hamel, assistant professor at the Asian School of the Environment from Nanyang Technological University. This, she added, is a crucial part of Singapore’s goal of reaching peaks in emissions by 2030 and reducing them thereafter.
“Thinking about food consumption and thinking about how people use air conditioning is part of (achieving climate goals),” she said. “Behavior change will be an integral part of it and, of course, urban design is the first way to affect and change behavior.”
Connect with nature
For Hamel, the integration of nature and residential areas – which creates “more opportunities for people to interact with nature” – is where Tengah’s plan excels. In addition to the aforementioned forest corridor, the townspeople will have access to community farming in the so-called plantation district.
Beyond promoting and protecting biodiversity, nature conservation at the site can lead to further changes in behavior, Hamel said.
“There are many examples, from around the world, showing that changing our relationship with nature through daily encounters helps people take environmental action,” she said.
“On that front, I think the biophilic design and (Tengah) master plan is doing a good job.”
The Nature Society Singapore (NSS), however, criticized the plan for conserving too little – less than 10% – of the site’s existing forest. The environmental group proposed two additional “core forest areas” at each end of the green corridor to promote biodiversity and protect migratory species.
The government said it was “fine-tuning” its plan based on the NSS report, although the Singapore Land Transport Authority has since revealed that more of the remaining forest – around 3% of the proposed corridor – would be cut down to make way for viaducts connecting the city. to a nearby highway.
(In an email to CNN, the agency said it would later replant the trees in the cleared area and create “temporary passageways suitable for wildlife … to provide safe passage for animals during construction.”)
Yet even Tengah’s critics have widely greeted the eco-city, with the NSS concluding its environmental criticism by saying it is still “encouraged by this bold plan.”
What these urban design initiatives mean for the rest of Singapore remains to be seen. When Tengah was first revealed in 2016, it was the first new city announced by the Singapore government in two decades, meaning all other neighborhoods were designed long before the era of autonomous vehicles and cars. equipment connected to the Internet.
Chong readily admitted that “it is not that easy” to upgrade underground road networks and pneumatic garbage chutes in existing cities.
Nonetheless, he struck a positive note when asked what Tengah’s model offers for future residential projects.
“We try to push all the lessons forward – whenever we can and to the best of our ability,” he said. “You look at Tengah and, in a nutshell, you see the future of what (the government) is trying to build: the future of cities.”
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