WEBINAR: Dense+Green Cities: Architecture as Urban Ecosystem

good evening ladies and gentlemen and i must also say maybe good morning to those of us who are joining outside of singapore from europe and from other parts of the world thank you for joining us today at the dance and green cities architecture as urban ecosystems online presentation and panel discussion my name is geraldine and i will lead you through the program this evening for today today together with a distinguished panel we will jointly explore the interaction between buildings and the city as ecological system how do we integrate greenery into a densely built environment what benefits does it bring to the city's inhabitants how can we make a density more sustainable livable and resilient these are some topics that we will explore today i would also like to take this opportunity to thank the design singapore council for supporting this event and making it possible with this it is apt to start off this evening with an opening address by mr mark rhee executive director of design singapore council mr markuy is a design thinking pioneer in singapore having designed award-winning innovative experiences for both the public and private sector as a design veteran with white industry connections mark has brought the work of the council to the attention of global design leaders he is an architect by training an award-winning one who was recognized by the urban redevelopment authority in 2017 as the top 20 under 45 architects in singapore that would define the next generation please welcome mr mark reed well good evening everyone a warm welcome to the dense green cities webinar which we at the design singapore council are proud to co-host with the singapore eth future cities laboratory and the singapore university of technology and design i'm mark the executive director of the design singapore council i'm also very happy to welcome such a wonderful and diverse audience from singapore and also beyond our shores i understand that today actually we have guests from europe the us and other asian countries as well i saw a shout out from philippines earlier so just thank you for joining all of us this evening or at least this evening for us a number of our guests may be joining in for the first time so i'd like to take a few moments to actually just introduce the design singapore council and actually what we do as the national agency for design our vision is actually for singapore to be an innovation driven economy and a lovable city through design our work focuses actually on three areas first we help organizations and enterprises actually use design as a strategy to grow business and deliver people-centered public services the second actually we play a large role in nurturing industry-ready talent and enabling a design-minded workforce for our future economy and the third we really want to advance the singapore brand through raising design appreciation on home ground and also emotional connections with people across the world through the seminar like the seminar right now so today's topic on the future of urban design and architecture is actually something that's very close to our hearts especially mine being an architect our dens green cities collaboration started with the future cities lab and sutd the singapore university of technology and design a few months ago through the droid organization of an exhibition hosted at our own national design center the center is currently shut due to covet measures but i'd love to show you some photos of the setup manual so my favorite part of the exhibition actually is this central installation of an organic structure interwoven with lush ferns my colleague reminded me he said that these funds might well be dead when we get back in i hope not but this is at least we captured this beautiful photo to show what you could have enjoyed if you were able to come to our center this also reminds me of one of singapore's most stunning buildings the oasis hotel downtown which is also featured in the exhibition later and which we awarded the president's design award in 2018. it is actually one of the projects showcased in the exhibition that will be covered in the main presentation later this evening such architectural innovation can actually be contextualized in singapore's wider national ambition to be a city in the garden with an area of around 720 square kilometers and a population of about 5.6 million people singapore actually has one of the highest population densities in the world so while it may seem like a luxury to set aside land for parks instead of residential commercial or industrial use our urban planners actually have recognized early on that well-designed natural nature spaces are essential in a livable and lovable city now especially as the country undergo a circuit breaker measures that require almost everyone to work and study from home included so there's such quick access to green spaces for short stroll or jog in the neighborhoods has actually been a huge relief to many and hence we did a poll earlier trying to understand who was using the nearest parts and the nearest green spaces being in a small city state with a highly modernized and urbanized population going in this direction is essential for residents to thrive and for the country to flourish so the future of architecture and planning in singapore must actually continue we feel to explore how greenery and density can be integrated to ensure that we live work and play in healthy and optimal environments and this is why we're actually proud to support projects like the dense green cities project as part of our own larger design future series which actually furthers a global conversation about how design can respond to challenges and channel and changes like rapid urbanization climate change technology destruction and other issues shaping society and increasingly no so going forward as designers are always reimagining the future that's what we do best we believe that introducing their work to the public will help add to the current discourse of our future by providing a platform for our design such design futures content we hope to inspire the public to come together start conversations and co-create solutions to complex challenges and of course today the greatest challenge that we all face is undoubtedly this covet 19 condemning which is one reason why we're all actually viewing this from home i'm doing this for my bedroom and the pandemic has certainly brought about devastation but has also created opportunity an opportunity for us to reflect regroup and maybe reimagine a new future for us all so i very look very much look forward to the presentations and discussions of this evening and this will undoubtedly uncover rich insights into this topic and beyond tonight we hope you'll keep in touch with us to continue this exploration and conversation so really if you're here do follow us on our social media through the links here and stay connected through our mailing list as we'll be working hard to bring you more such content on design futures in the coming months so enjoy the evening i think it's very heartening to know that the design singapore council is not only trying to make singapore more livable but also more lovable so this is a very interesting dimension thank you very much yes um yes and some of you would have seen the exhibition and would may know that the exhibition and the book dance and green series is based on a research project at the future city laboratory under the singapore eth center the future cities laboratory also known as fcl is established by eth zurich and the national research foundation of singapore in collaboration with partners including the singapore university of technology and design or sutd the program seeks to shape future cities through its research based on science by design and in place in this context the research on dance and rebuilding typologies was started as one of the twelve projects under the program we had the pleasure today of learning more about the fcl from professor stephen kemps program director of the future cities laboratory at the singapore eth center before his appointment as the program director of fcl he was the head of department of architecture and director of the edinburgh school of architecture and landscape architecture he has published books including drifting migrancy and architecture the sage handbook of architectural theory buildings must die a perverse view of architecture please welcome professor stephen kentz hi everybody um very nice to um join you even if it's uh remote this is a very interesting kind of new format i think we're all getting used to and there's some wonderful opportunities particularly able to talk to you from in different parts of the world um as geraldine said my name is stephen cairns i'm the director of the future cities laboratory um our home university is uh hth zurich and we've been based in singapore for some time now and we collaborate with universities in singapore and also in the region as geraldine said our mission is to shape sustainable cities through science by design in place now we're often uh we we're very interested in the tension between these three words science design and place science of course aspires to universally applicable truths um place of course is about the opposite it's about identification of localities which are different uh be that through the way it engages with environment or history or culture and we like to think about design as a kind of practice and discipline that helps link science in place it's of course no accident that we are based here in singapore because singapore has a very particular an exemplary role in developing a certain kind of technologically advanced city and this has massive uh interest worldwide and it is a direct example for the way in which cities all around us in asia in this most rapidly developing region of the world singapore in a way functions as one of the kind of prominent models for developing a city well which is one of the reasons why eth is interested in being in singapore if you're thinking about science design and place of course this is very complex quite difficult to do it's obviously interdisciplinary and the work that you were here this evening in is from the project ensign green it's a great example of this kind of work uh you'll see the work of architects urban designers ecologists landscape architects sociologists i even think there are some economists involved now all of these different disciplinary figures speak slightly different languages they probably all speak english but i mean by language a specific kind of disciplinary language so a certain approach a certain way of doing research a certain way of considering something to be data or not certain way of publishing and outputting that research so in fcl particularly with our institutional colleagues we've developed a certain way of thinking about complex questions uh in inter interdisciplinary ways and it's not easy to do and we're very pleased that you get to see a great example of that this evening and then finally uh another thing that we do is that we are not solo operators here we interact with local institutions and of course singapore university of technology and design and design singapore are two of those so i'm really excited about this evening's work um i hope uh as mark said please if we ever get to travel again we hope that you come and visit us if not in the meantime please look out for us on the normal social media um and website channels thanks again and have a great uh have a great session i'll see you again soon later on thank you professor steven kentz as mentioned earlier that webinar is organized in conjunction with an exhibition and also the launch of the book of the same name dance and green cities architecture as urban ecosystem as the author of the book professor thomas schroedfer has the challenge of bringing the exhibition and book alive through this presentation this evening he is defining associate head of pillar of architecture and sustainable design at the singapore university of technology and design or sutd and principal investigator of the dance and green building typology research project at the future cities laboratory he has received prestigious awards and recognitions including the asia education leadership award president's design award which is the singapore's highest owner according to designers and designs across all disciplines please welcome professor thomas schuffer thank you geraldine uh good evening from singapore and thank you mark and stephen for your introductions also a big thank you from my side to design singapore council in the national design center singapore for supporting and hosting our exhibition and tonight's event so for the next 45 minutes or so i will try to provide you with an overview of our work on dense and green architecture and cities and i'm going to start sharing my screen now with you so before i go into into the actual presentation uh i want to highlight that to work on a project like this of course you can do this by yourself a lot of what i'm going to talk about tonight is the result of hard work over the last four and a half years on a project called dance and green building typologies which as both mark and steven mentioned as well as geraldine is part of the future cities laboratory here in singapore i'm the principal investigator of this project my co-principal investigator is also joining us tonight is professor sasha mintz from the eth zurich we had a wonderful research team as well that you can see in the slide here and we had many many contributors both from government agencies as well as practice so you see it's quite a long and impressive list of stakeholders that we were able to work with over the last four to five years so my presentation tonight will largely go along to major publications that came out of the dense and green research one is a book that came out right at the beginning of fcl 2 and it is titled dancing green innovative building types for sustainable urban architecture so in a way it a little bit predates the work that we did with the future cities lab but it just shows you this is a topic that i have worked on for quite some time for a topic like this i think it's important to not just try to cover this all by yourself so just like i was supported by a research team for a book publication like this is good to bring in other experts so you see the list here it includes some quite illustrious names including case christians and so on so what we try to do with this first book is to explore innovations in architectural typologies that originate from the integration of green components such as sky terraces green facades and vertical parks in high density buildings so we did this through a series of in-depth case studies but really very much the focus of this first book was an architectural view so we felt something is happening there's a very interesting new paradigm coming up in the discourse of architecture landscape architecture and urbanism and we felt it was the right time to explore this through a series of case studies the second book which is actually the the basis for the exhibition at the national design center and very much the result of the work of the last four and a half years at the future cities laboratory is dense and green cities architecture's urban ecosystem which of course is also the title of tonight's presentation uh again there are contributors to the book um including peter rowe there are some colleagues from eth zurich and of course my co-principal investigator sasha mends so in this book we try to kind of the the research is really on the emergent understanding of the building and the city as ecological systems and we were very interested in the question of the interaction of particularly large-scale buildings with the city so the question here is in which ways can buildings contribute to the ecology of their surroundings how can urban districts with their green and blue networks link up with the elements and technologies of building design so again we uh we investigate all these questions through a number of essays as well as benchmark case studies and as in the previous book we collaborated with a number of renowned architects urbanists landscape designers as well as government agencies in singapore so the structure of the book is what you see below we start with what we refer to as dance and green agendas that is followed by a second part of the book which talks about dense and green dimensions that's really the kind of scientific backbone of of the research that we did followed by the case studies and kind of a speculation of where all of this is going to lead us in the future so i'll use the books as i said as a as a kind of an image backdrop for the argument i'm trying to make here so we start with the emerging dense and green paradigm and when you look back in history of course the idea of integrating landscape architecture and architecture is is not really new and this uh image this um engraving from the 19th century uh depicts uh one of the seven wonders of the ancient world which are the hanging gardens of babylon and you see probably an architecture that at that time would go for a high-density building but you see even though this is just an imagination of what this building might have looked like you see a very close integration of greenery and and architecture so when we fast forward to modern times this is 1931 uh the famous villa savoir by le corbusier so with the modern movement there are again these these ideas that the building could somehow integrate or at least replace the the greenery that it occupies with its footprint on the ground on the roof level so this certainly was a was a paradigm shifting project in the history of architecture again we fast forward another 70 years to the year 2000 and the very important expo 2000 that in that year took place in hanover in germany and a lot of the discourse of this event was uh on sustainability providing better models for future cities and also architecture in such future cities and what you see here in the in the images is what i think was a very important project in in that respect it is the netherlands pavilion by mbrdb and you see uh literally the architects stack uh landscape and architecture in a building that is then topped by uh energy production this case uh windmill so it's i would say it's not so much a building but more a statement about what future architecture and landscape architecture in a highly populated place like the netherlands could could look like so here you see that building in elevation and this image is not taken outside of the building it is somewhere in the middle where you see that the architects literally took nature as the structure for for the pavilion again we jump forward to the year 2008 so more recently we see a lot of explorations of this uh combination of landscape architecture and architecture uh this is one example on the left is adelie jean nouvelle's 10 000 santa monica boulevard in los angeles this is not a build example but it shows you that the disco certainly is is very interested in uh in this combination and this in a place california los angeles that is not necessarily known for sustainable architecture on the right you see a build example that we have also studied as part of our research it is stefano berry architects bosco vertical in milan from the year 2015 and here you have a larger image of this project so i think this one is a very interesting example of a dense and green architecture in europe so a couple of things to highlight here the building is certainly bigger larger than its urban context so there is an idea of densification and the ambition of the architects here was not just to provide a beautiful small skyscraper with luxurious residences but also to do something for the immediate urban environment that it is part of in this case it is a very polluted air polluted part of milan and the ambition of the architects here was through the use of plans in this case literally providing a vertical forest for the city of milan to improve the environmental quality of of the district here's a little bit closer up the same building so you see a large cantilevering balconies occupied with quite intense greenery all of this is done in collaboration with botanists so this is uh very much maintained it changes color over the course of the year so in addition to offering environmental services certainly there's a there's a quite an interesting aesthetic that emerges from uh projects like this closer to home here in singapore this is the project that mark mentioned in his introduction this is wahas o asia hotel downtown seen from street level a very interesting building here in the heart of the central business district of singapore so you see what originally started as a screen facade in red you see this on the upper part of the building is slowly overgrown with greenery from behind the facade so ultimately this project will be an entirely green green building in the heart of singapore this is the same building seen from what i believe is level 26. so uh we're looking down on one of the very very large sky gardens in that building in fact about 80 percent of this building are sky gardens only about 20 percent of the building is in closed volume it is a mixed use uh project so it has a hotel it has office buildings it office components it has some residential components all of this is combined in a in a high density high livability uh project power excellence in our research over over the last couple of years we have looked at the many many aspects of such dense and green buildings including of course the the technologies that go with this so i will just give you an overview of the various dimensions that we were interested in so this for example is a contribution by atelier 10 nari pinyabatana who looked at how buildings with greenery perform better particularly in the tropics because in the tropics it's all about cooling buildings and of course the greenery can can help with exactly that but we also looked at the buildings the dense and green buildings contribution to the urban context that is it is part of so think about urban heat islands uh and of course a building that works with a lot of greenery can help to mitigate urban heat island effects as well we have looked at the aspects of blue green infrastructures for buildings in livable cities and for this uh we worked for some time with herbert eiseitel who you might know is a is a very well known uh landscape architect german landscape architect who did some really pioneering work uh including the one that you see in this slide here on the right is potsdamer platz in berlin the year 2000 where retention ponds were included in the center of what is now a very very dense part of the capital of germany but it's not just the functionality of of blue and green that have advised was in here and discusses in his essay it is also uh the the kind of new quality you see the livability aspect uh that comes to the foreground quite nicely we have looked into biological functionalities of green and this dimension includes for example how greenery reduces soil erosion and regulates water flows in cities how greenery can help improve water quality how it improves air quality as mentioned in the case of of stefano berry's project in milan we have looked at the very large scale as well here's a contribution titled green urbanism models of a dense and green urban context by case christianza who was very much involved in what's still the current phase of the future cities laboratory and he's not he was he's retired now but he has also an important practice in in the netherlands kcap which of course executed projects like this all over the world zooming in on the on the architectural scale um there are very interesting implications of what we refer to the as the dense and green paradigm for dense and green building typologies uh for example museums and the example that you see here on the right is hearts of demeron's miami art museum from 2013 and this is a great example also in a tropical context how greenery is woven through a series of boxes that contained actual museum content so in a way the the result is both landscape architecture and architecture and it's not just aesthetically a very interesting effect again because of the proximity to the water in this case and the occasional flooding of the area that this building is part of it also has it it has it provides a very important ecological service to the city of miami this is all to highlight that of course dance and green buildings are not something particular to singapore but i would say that these typologies have been experimented with all over the world so on the right you see another example a very famous example by now which is james corner field operations steelers video and renfros highline in new york uh from the year 2008 here in a larger image so it's a very interesting uh idea to adapt um in this case an old piece of infrastructure an elevated railway uh that ran through a good part of lower manhattan all the way to midtown and to make this a linear park and this project as i'm sure you know uh is not only famous but has also been inspiring many other projects all over the world including mbrdb's solo project in seoul in korea talking about the dense and green case studies that we have looked at i would like to start with the kutek quad hospital here in singapore which i think is is a very interesting institutional case kutek bot hospital was located in a much bigger campus before it moved into its new building that you see here on the on the photograph and as the the hospital had to move to its new location with a much smaller footprint the the management of kutek but asked the architects to please help to maintain the quality of the old hospital with its lush setting and a lot of greenery around it and to bring this somehow in a high density project and of course the approach that the architects took because there is no no other option is to fold the greenery into the into the vertical dimension of the project so what i'll show you here are the section of the building i believe that you can see my mouse moving over the drawing so you see how greenery is included on multiple levels there's a very large kind of atrium space and the building opens up to an adjacent urban park so it makes direct connection to this it kind of pulls in the the local ecosystem into the building and folds it up into the vertical dimension what you see on the left are two shots of this project taken on different levels um none of them being the ground floor so you see the greenery is is very prominent on all the levels you see sky bridges planter boxes used everywhere and then on the lower image you see a very interesting component which is an urban farming component that the architects decided to include and that has been very successful in uh growing uh all sorts of things that are consumed by the hospital itself but it is also a way to bring in uh the the neighbors of the hospital so it is uh not just run by the hospital but indeed it actually functions as a as a social connector for the whole urban context that this project is part of which in a way is is a good moment to introduce also the social component that we're interested in in these projects so greenery can of course bring people together be it in the form of just a simple sky garden that is a common or public space in a project but certainly also with urban farming that has gained tremendous popularity in singapore over the last couple of years another institutional building i would like to mention here is school of the arts a project by voja it predates the asia hotel downtown by a couple of years but you see here in the view from the adjacent dolby gold green which is an urban park you see the inclusion of greenery on the facade and when we look in the upper right we look at the building straight on from the adjacent green public space you see how the architects divide the the massing into three blocks and in a way they pull the greenery through this uh through these void spaces throughout the building and you see in the section uh how the footprint is replicated as a green space uh on top with uh trees and a running track that connects all these three will volumes on a higher level so again is is the same idea that the building section in a way becomes an extension of the adjacent urban green u space we are going to another typology now we're looking at an early example of a residential typology here in singapore newton suites by the same architects boha and to to work on a residential project of this size it is actually very important for the architects to break down the volume into uh parts um and includes common spaces that bring people together so this is an early example where you see the cantilevering uh small green spaces every five levels that in a way introduce a kind of a mini neighborhood in an otherwise very or fairly large uh residential uh development so this is then combined with a green wall that runs the entire uh height of of the building so on the left in the the the aerial view you see this uh these these common spaces for uh for the residents of newton's suites as well as in the section you also see that otherwise very utilitarian structures like the parking garage are used for again a common space where there's a blue space there's a there's a pool uh there's a lot of greenery included and you see that again the greenery is pulled up from the ground level all the way to the very top of the building so this is a private residential development but these strategies have since then also been employed in a number of housing public housing projects or housing development board projects in the context of singapore here you see a bit closer up a typical unit and i want to highlight here again the section so as you live in one of these units you have a visual connection to a tree a green space right in front of your unit another great example in uh in our opinion is uh the the interlace by oma and bureau ole sharon rsp architects who are the local architects for this one this one is a very interesting project because it also offers a completely different take on uh the typology the type of a residential development so it is not the typical podium tower typology that you see in many many of the the developments here in singapore but in a way it rethinks this and breaks down a very large volume in a series of blocks that you see here in plan that then enclose smaller common courtyard spaces and of course they also introduce these sky gardens and roof gardens that part of them are common so they're open to all the residents of the interlace part of them some of them are part of the the units that are adjacent to them but you see here in the in the aerial shot here give you the bigger aerial photograph so you see there's a very interesting again combination of landscape architecture on multiple levels uh in the project um as well as a kind of a an opening up of what would otherwise be a very large bulky volume and i'm going to use this project also to highlight that often architects of such developments they try quite consciously to connect to larger urban blue and green systems in this case you see here in the background uh southern ridges singapore southern ridges which is a green corridor that runs uh east west in in the southern part of the island and the architects try to to pull this into into uh the massing of the project and there are very interesting effects in terms of biodiversity as well as rainwater retention and release and serving some of these bigger urban uh blue and green networks with a project like like this just to give you an idea of the the scale of a project like the interlace so the interlace has uh just over a thousand units so that means is about three and a half thousand four thousand people that live in a development like this so it's it's quite a massive scale and i would say it justifies to look at buildings like this as as almost kind of small small city districts we have covered residential developments we have looked at institutional buildings so now we have a quick look at some infrastructure examples some of you who are here from singapore or from the region i'm sure you're familiar with the singapore's airport changi and it's terminal three i think is a prime example for exactly that kind of thinking in an infrastructure project so in terminal 3 the architects decided to include greenery on a fairly impressive scale on the interior of the building and you see here all of this is topped with quite an interesting roof that allows for daylight to filter and in a way provide optimum daylight conditions for the plants underneath this roof was designed by the the american firm som so here you see the result [Music] again greenery greets you as you as you move to this building uh everywhere and the the most recent development in in changi is of course the the jewel which i would say uh pushes this this whole idea of the integration of greenery in an infrastructure project to the extreme so we're looking here at a rendering but now of course the project is completed of the the so-called jewel a project by safti architects and what i want to highlight here is the section of this building so it is a commercial project yet the client and the architects decided to have a very large kind of botanical garden on on the interior and make this uh the heart of the whole of shanghai airport and i would say that that actually says a lot about how singapore thinks about the integration of greenery again let me stress here that this is not a public project this is a commercial project of course and still the clients believe that including such an attraction uh on the interior of this building would uh allow itself uh to be marketed in the in the kind of most optimum uh way so this is by the way this is not a rendering this is the the actual uh jewel as it is today the examples i just shared with you were mainly singaporean examples i just want to include here one that we also looked at over the last four and a half years which is one central park another project by atelier jean nouvelle in in sydney in australia fairly recent project as well and i chose to include this in today's presentation because it shows some interesting aspects in a different climate in this case the building shows the building section here shows a very large mirror that helps to redirect the sunlight into the depth of this atrium space here that extends below ground level and in a way the help of with the help of technology a dense and green building is is possible uh in a in a climate that otherwise would probably be more problematic in terms of uh achieving the necessary uh daylight that you need for the plants to grow so i think this uh is an interesting example as well again it is a high density project a mixed-use project so it is in a way a small vertical city here on the upper right you see again the the technology part the heliostat or the mirror that helps to redirect the light and allow plants to grow on on all levels of of the building by the way the the greenery is uh designed by patrick blanc uh quite a well-known uh botanist from france who has worked with herzog cameron and many other important current practices on a number of projects all over the world in our research we very much like to bring in the knowledge of the practitioners that have explored such buildings over over many years and i think it's it's fair to say that fostering partners is certainly one of the pioneers of including green spaces in high density buildings so they provided us with their knowledge on in this case environmental performance optimization on the urban and the building scale projects that seminal projects that they uh authored of course include the commerce bank building in frankfurt unfortunately i have no slide of this here but it is a high-rise building in in germany that includes green spaces on multiple levels so i think that was one of the early ones in europe another one includes the the gherkin in london or projects such as the one that you see here on the on the right which is called the great glass house and you will obviously see the resemblance of projects that that predate the jewel by 18 about 18 years with what is currently going on in a place like singapore we have worked quite closely also with mvrdb a well-known dutch practice uh i shared with you earlier in the presentation they are important netherlands pavilion from the year 2000 so this is certainly another example of a practice that has engaged with the inclusion of green spaces in many many of their projects over the years the project that you see here is mucky next is a project that has not been executed yet from the year 2012 a rendering for shopping mall in the heart of barcelona in spain where the the volume of the building is pushed into the ground and it gives them the architects the opportunity to have a continuous green space public park on the on the rooftop which they felt was was important for this very dense part of the city of barcelona these are other examples including the one on the right a project called peruvia 88 in jakarta from the year 2012 a massive mixed-use building that includes greenery landscape space common and public spaces on on many many levels this project is currently on hold but nevertheless i decided to include it in the presentation just to in a way illustrate where the discourse stands so if architects could they would probably push building design in in this direction so we're back here with boha a practice that of course because of the the physical proximity uh we're in here with them in singapore have worked with on on many many of their projects meaning they have provided us with a lot of their insights for for our research so here again you see on the right uh the school of the arts in a in a section and what i referred to earlier the extension of the green space the week out green public green space in the heart of singapore all the way through the building all the way up to this connected roof with a running track for the students of this this institution i mentioned earlier when i spoke about the newton suites the private residential development that since that project voha has also been able to bring these ideas these design strategies in some of the projects that they did for public housing for the housing development board here in singapore here is an award-winning project on the left uh titled um skywheel at dawson a massive development uh roughly the same scale like the interlace that i shared with you earlier so again you see quite nicely in the building section the inclusion of green common spaces for the residents a roof garden that tops all of this and you see uh here to the to the left uh the use of uh the parking structure as a as a kind of a small neighborhood uh park on an on an elevated level we have also worked with ken young and you know if i refer to some of the other practices as pioneers i would say he is really the pioneer among the pioneers he is responsible for a number of projects uh here in singapore including the the national library and he is certainly one of the the the architects that for a long time have thought about uh both on the building scale as well as on the urban scale about a meaningful integration of uh green and and architectural design he has in more recent years he has also participated in a number of urban scale competitions here you see uh his proposal for hong kong our loon master plan from the year 2009 because what we see in a lot of these architects uh thinking is of course the realization that dance and green building makes most sense when it is connected to a larger urban green and blue system so where does all of this leave us and what is there to say about the dense and green future so certainly some of the the practices that we have worked with over the years they have they have all developed their their ideas and at times visualized these ideas for what a dense and green urban future might look like so i give you here as a big image rendering from the year i believe 2011 by voja so certainly this is a practice that has over the years gained a lot of experience with this this building type this denser green building type and here is a vision that they put forward in the context of a design studio that they ran here in singapore at the national university of singapore with a number of students so you see these ideas playing out on a really massive scale for those of you who are not familiar with singapore singapore as land scores in other words space is is limited so therefore i think singapore for quite a number of years now has been on the forefront of experimenting with building types that do not sacrifice livability ideas of large public and common spaces but really to explore how those amenities and services in the city can be can unfold on not just the ground level but on multiple levels so this is a kind of a visionary example of this it's called a permeable lattice city so you see here in the background you see a stadium you see parks you see productive landscapes you see windmills so it is really uh clearly the ambition to to provide a vertical city but also a livable kind of a livable vertical sustainable environment i already mentioned that singapore uh in many respects is is on the forefront of uh the exploration of many of the aspects that i discussed over the last half hour or so in 2012 there was a special edition by architecture and urbanism which of course in the field of architecture urban design urban planning is a very important publication uh this edition was titled singapore capital city for vertical green so clearly what is stated here is not not just an architectural agenda or the agenda of some urban design practices but it is clearly an agenda for the whole of singapore so i would say that singapore has for quite some time now of course recognized the importance of these developments and of course has since its foundation independence in the 1960s always been interested in first being a garden city and then later the planning paradigm changed to being a city in a garden and what is now discussed on the level of planning and policy making is making singapore a city in nature so i think this uh this special edition of architecture and urbanism highlights that it is indeed a very fertile ground that these experiments that i shared with you fall onto uh in the context of singapore some very recent developments uh to uh in a way illustrate where the discourse stands right now and where the practice of architecture and urban design stands right now this is again a very recent quite a massive mixed-use development in the central business district of singapore it's engenhofen architects marina one and what i would like to highlight here is one of course again the the inclusion of green space on multiple levels so we're not on ground level here we are somewhere on level 10 i believe in the building so there is a massive atrium space that is lush and green and is accessible by everyone in the central business district area but here's really what i'm trying to get at again you see the strategy is to connect to an adjacent urban green space to pull the greenery over here two levels in the building provide an atrium space on multiple levels and then replicate green spaces throughout throughout the project so this is not just uh to again to provide a nice slush and green environment which i think already is an important achievement but there are many many uh interesting uh massing strategies and technological uh aspects to the inclusion of greenery in this project that also come with the dense and green paradigm in architecture another example i want to quickly share with you is a very recent project again by boha titled kampung admiralty i would argue it is a high density project it is catering to the elderly population which with demographic change that happens here in singapore as well as in many other parts of the world is is somehow uh an important aspect to to deal with for architects and urban designers but what this project does is uh it layers multiple programs public programs uh commercial programs on the on the ground level with programs that cater to the elderly population such as doctors hospitals all sorts of uh things that deal with physical therapy uh that that would be good for elderly communal facilities etc it combines it with uh elderly uh housing in in these towers on the side and all of this is topped with a very large green elevated park so this picture is not again not taken from ground level but from somewhere up so you see uh what kind of uh high quality uh high density urban environment is achieved in a in a project like this i think it becomes even more obvious when we look at the building section so again this is not just to have a nice greenery included on multiple levels but it serves multiple functions it filters rain water uh it helps with urban heat island effects and so on and so on so it covers many of the aspects i touched on earlier in the presentation this uh another project we have studied over the the last couple of years is punggol waterway terrace is won by a group 8 asia and aida's architects and i included this project because it shows very nice the inclusion of in this case a sunken green space in one of these courtyards in fact this chord it is called a jungle coordinate and again this courtyard connects what you don't see here on the slide on the right to a linear green and blue space that connects the building uh to the larger networks of the city of singapore this image shows you uh it illustrates in a way the the tremendous interest that we have received in the work that we have been doing over the last couple of years this is our exhibition at the 2018 venice biennale and we are supposed to be included in this year's biennale as well but of course as you know because of the kovic situation uh we don't know if it's going to happen when it's going to happen it's gonna it's currently scheduled to open at the end of august but i guess we all have to stay tuned if if it actually happens so if so please go there have a look at at our exhibition there coming back to the more scientific aspects of our research we have of course with the future cities laboratory use the scientific methods to understand better uh the services that these buildings provide so we have looked in a lot of detail into the question of biodiversity so are there biodiversity services these buildings provide the short answer is yes the long answer unfortunately in the interest of time i have to refer you to to our book so we have looked at plans we have looked at animals and indeed what we found compared to control cases around the buildings that we studied is that there is a very positive impact that dense and green buildings have on biodiversity we have looked at the aspects of building performance such as surface temperature which of course particularly in the tropics as i mentioned earlier is a very important aspect where it is a lot about the cooling of facades so clearly we we can show that the use of greenery in dense and green buildings helps with bringing down the cooling load and that of course translates to bringing down the energy needs of dense and green buildings so for this we have put sensors in buildings and taken thermal images and so on so we have used multiple methodologies to understand this we have also looked at the construction and maintenance costs of integrated green spaces in buildings because we found that very often when we present our research that is one of the the first question that comes up is yeah it's all nice and beautiful but isn't it very expensive so of course we cannot talk for the the whole world but certainly the cases that we have studied in singapore what we found is the increase in construction and maintenance costs when you do a dense and green a typical dense and green building in in this climatic context that we're in is about three to five percent but what is interesting is uh that we also found that the return on investment is quite substantial so i give you just one example which is a hotel here the park royale on pickering by boha architects which is a dense and green building which is a four-star hotel but it charges five-star hotel prices and interestingly dense and green buildings have a positive uh impact uh economically not only on uh their their own space but also on the urban space around them so a project like um asia hotel downtown also leads to an increase in in rents of buildings that have now the the very nice view of this building right in front of them we have studied in quite some depth also the economic benefits of vegetation on and around residential developments so are willing are people willing residents willing to pay more to live in a dense and green building and again the short answer is yes and we have looked at this in the context of singapore we have looked at this in multiple locations on the on the island and i think we found some very very interesting results which again unfortunately in the interest of time i have to refer you to uh to our publications uh before i conclude um i give you one example here of a typical case study in the book that served also as the basis for our current exhibition at the national design center so we have studied a project like o asia hotel downtown in terms of its green contribution to the larger urban context that it sits in we have then looked at the architectural strategies and mapped all this in a series of isometric drawings that i exploded that you see here on the right we have looked again at aspects of biodiversity terms of plants in terms of plants as well as animals we have studied in great detail uh surface temperature so the energetic performance of buildings like this and the positive impact that greenery can have on the building uh in this case behind the screen and we have looked at the space use the social component so how do people actually use these spaces what do they like about them do they use spaces that are green more than spaces that are not green in in quite some detail and we have provided these so-called social heat maps and you see an example to the right where we tracked over the course of days and weeks and months the use of green spaces common and public green spaces in such buildings so i will conclude with this image which is one of my favorite photographs of kampung admiralty because it talks about in my opinion a beautiful integration of of livable space green space high density uh architecture in a in a quite dense part of singapore and i want to conclude with this short statement here to also provide a segway to the panel discussion that will follow density as many of the denser green projects we have studied demonstrate can be designed and designed well it can be the ultimate test of intelligent design and at its best make our cities more beautiful more livable more sustainable and more resilient and with this i will conclude and stop sharing my screen so back to geraldine please thank you professor thomas schroeder for bringing us around the world to view exemplary green architecture that not only inspires but also stretches our imagination so right now before we proceed to the next section which is um the panel discussion we have launched a poll to get a sense of what you people in the audience are experiencing so the question is what is the furthest you would walk to a green feature or a park two minutes five minutes ten minutes fifteen or more than fifteen minutes please take some time to fill up this survey the shots a day so here we've got most people would walk ten minutes or even up to 15 minutes to reach to reach a nearest park or a green feature i think that's that's great we shall begin the panel discussion firstly by introducing our panelists so earlier on we had already introduced a few people mr mark rhee executive director of design singapore council we have professor stephen kentz program director of future cities laboratory at the singapore ethics center professor thomas schroedfer professor and funding associate head of pillar for architecture and sustainable design at sutd and now also joining them in this panel we have professor roland bofane he is associate professor in engineering and product development pillar and sutd professor buffenet is also the director of sutd applied complexity group that conducts interdisciplinary research at the interface of complexity science artificial intelligence and engineering design he is also the co-principal investigator of the city's urban science and design for density research project at sutd he is finally also research associate with the department of mechanical engineering at mit up next we have miss sri lalitha gopalakrishnan she is landscape architect and first vice president of the council of the singapore institute of landscape architects orsila sri has over 15 years of professional experience and a diverse portfolio of projects across singapore malaysia china hong kong and india she worked with tierra design in singapore for over 11 years on projects ranging from residential commercial hospitality institutional recreational to master planning with many other projects many accolades last but not least we have professor sasha mans his professor for architecture and building processes at eth zurich and code investigator of the dance and green building typology research projects at the futures cities laboratory as thomas has mentioned earlier he also served as dean of the department of architecture founded and led the institute of technology in architecture at eth zurich and he founded sam architects and partners in 1997 where he has been actively engaged in architectural competitions throughout the world these publications include public space evolution in high density living in singapore and three books on the building process so here we have six panelists for this evening so in this panel we will discuss impact of density in cities and impact on city dwellers what is the value of green buildings in high density cities can density be designed to make cities more livable sustainable and resilient and at a time of pandemic how can we reduce the vulnerability of a density so perhaps we'll start off a panel discussion with mark so mark in your opinion first of all why do we need to discuss about density why is this an important topic i mean i think obviously density is uh it's important for a variety of reasons i mean we've learned that density actually has been very real and has even sort of deadly effects i mean the most obvious example being the rapid spread of the virus recently in sort of more highly urbanized sort of cities that we've seen so obviously singapore being a city new york i mean you see that definitely we also learned that by but alongside that um the idea of sort of density being able to just be intensify some of these things we've also learned that by 2025 i think more than 600 cities actually will have a population of over a million people so really this whole discussion of actually how to live well in such environments actually therefore really come at a very timely moment and um all the more with the current situation so what i hope to actually to discuss with my fellow panelists tonight and our audience as well as how can we actually collectively reimagine our future cities and spaces that actually can't allow can allow residents to be safe healthy and thriving at the same time thank you mark uh next we move on to professor sasha mense in the dance and green building typology research projects you looked at the different benefits of green building typologies in high density cities including environmental social economic and aesthetics do some of these needs sometimes compete and how should planners and designers deal with this competing needs thank you geraldine and welcome to everybody from switzerland still cold here as you can see i'm wearing a jacket and you're all sitting in the tropics and of course dancing green is also a big question in europe and of course also in switzerland our cities are not as tense maybe paris or london but other cities not yet but returning to your returning to your question yes on one hand interdisciplinary approach respects the different stakeholders involved this is what we do we work interdisciplinary thomas has depicted it brilliantly before in his in his speech and you you can see that it's it's not an architect alone it's it's a diversity of people scientists engineers designers involved and all around questioning economic topics at the end the economics in our world are basic are the major topics but still it's not the only one all the social questions which came up also by thomas how people use these spaces how they like them how they even appropriate these spaces if they don't have maybe a clear function it's all questions which stand for my opinion at the at the beginning and on our top and in this sense it's interdisciplinary interdisciplinary research and it will maybe also change let's say also the metier our the material of an architect so it's not he's not the only one alone at the table creating but we have to be used to work together with scientists with botanists with with sociologists with economic involved people so it's a it's a big bunch of people and as an architect i'm a practicing architect i'm on my way learning to be engaged in all these questions and having all these people in a team and we showed it within our future cities lab team together with with thomas and the whole team that we were all interdisciplinary and we had to learn like stephen said our different languages english was our let's say common ground but it's not english alone there are different english and different languages so we had really to understand each other respect each other and these are maybe some new topics to be achieved in the future when you work as an architect when you work as an urban planner thank you sasha so talking about different disciplines we have a landscape architect industry so sri as a landscape architect can you share with us what is the value of integrated open space thank you geraldine and good evening everybody yeah i do bring one of the dimensions which sasha mentioned and i think integrated green open spaces are actually extremely um critical in when we talk about livability when we talk about sustainability in density and high density environments so the open spaces of course they give you all the values which thomas has already shared which is environmental ecological social um the health and well-being benefits and of course the economic benefits but i think there are a few more dimensions which it adds one is which i think is very very significant is the idea of accessibility and connectivity i think once you integrate buildings not just at the ground level but at multiple levels as we are moving vertical it kind of brings those spaces right to your doorsteps and i think in today's uh today's living having the access nature at your doorstep is a luxury and what we have seen is um that is where there is the difference of a high density city becoming livable uh versus becoming um you know a concrete jungle so um that's a very very significant value which integrated open spaces at and of course the aesthetics and the branding and the image of more integrated green spaces is also something which is extremely valuable towards having a city perceived as livable yeah thank you stream so today we have in our title is dance and green city so there are two components the dance part and the green part right so um for stephen in your work you've explored different kinds of settlements and different kind of densities is there such thing as a good density or bad density can good density be designed the simple answer is yes um there must be a good and there must be a bad density otherwise they wouldn't need designers to manage it um but of course the really interesting thing and that is the devil is in the detail um you know as mark has already alluded density is is really significant issue again uh for a long time everybody basically felt that a good city was a dense city um of course there was always los angeles and there was always you know sprawl sprawl conditions but generally people thought that high-density cities were with the right way to make cities and you can think about threat from the singaporean agencies like the ura the statutory planning authority uh the housing authority you could go to the world bank the u.n the ipcc even this is the agency looking at planetary climate change still regards the city as a dense city as a good city now of course that's all um up for debate again and i think there's the data is is just not available to us we simply don't know the effects of density and and the pandemic um but it's very useful to rethink about rethink density again um density is a really beautiful uh term of course it doesn't mean we're talking obviously inside a disciplinary framework we're not talking about the density of stone or wood we're talking about population density so how populations are gathered together as thomas already alluded to this is not only the population of people there's population of animals perhaps and bugs and i noticed a couple of people asking about mosquitoes so there's an ecological density that goes with it we've got to think a little bit about that and i think thomas's uh book has already sketched that stuff out so density is very important to understand we talk about population density um it's also related to a number of other words it's related to other words like intensity and compactness tightness uh crowdedness in fact it's quite different from crowdedness so the benefits of density lie in intensity density it can also flip to becoming a very very dangerous condition which is why density is very important in an urban design in the sense it's very important to distinguish from crowdedness so you can have very high quality density which is managed by the reason in the way that this three was talking about how you access it how do you access the outdoors how do you how do you get public transport how close are jobs can you access uh simple things like electricity the wi-fi the internet if all of these things are not available then that density very quickly turns into a kind of crowded condition which is a very dangerous and and as we started to see probably quite a threatening a threatening situation so density is very tricky term it's right back in the uh in the in the darker public opinion i think it's a very very important very timely study that we're starting to think about that question as always it's in a city which is one of as we all know is one of the most complex human artifacts ever made it's never one thing it's never just density you can have very high quality density and as we've seen in singapore you get high quality densities and you also get low quality densities as we saw through the the dorms so at the moment singapore is going through a really interesting discussion about how to handle these diverse kinds of density and become again this really important kind of model for a certain kind of high density and very responsible responsible urbanism thank you stephen so i will summarize that density is a complex issue so then the next question goes to the complexity scientist to roland so roland as a complexity scientist can you provide some insights on human movement in a dense environment and how human movement may make some places more or less vulnerable thank you very much geraldine and indeed it's a fantastic transition uh you know from from stephen to to myself uh because over the last year or so my research team and i we have been working on a particular question of human movement in the third dimension a lot of work has been done on you know how people move in just you know two dimensions but uh third i mentioned the vertical dimension is extremely important indeed density in cities often rhymes with verticality and very little is known about you know how we move up and down in those vertical cities so our results uh showing that some very unique patterns of human vertical movement are taking place so with thomas uh right now we have uh we're working on a very exciting project aim at uh essentially quantifying the influence of green spaces uh especially when they are vertically distributed in buildings uh and how they affect human movement so this uh clearly will ease the congestion that you have on the ground floor uh and also on the ground as well and also providing a positive human building interaction now of course with kovid 19 density goes against the new rules of social distancing so there comes a question of how do we deal with high density places and obviously density has a very clear definition from the scientific perspective but density varies widely in the city and one you know we you know we might think that uh there are only places with high density that would be vulnerable to disease transmission like the central business district but it turns out that the reality is actually more complex than that um what really matters uh are actually the patterns of human co-presence when we get into contact whether at work or it could be in public spaces including public transports and and stephen mentioned uh what happens in the dorms and foreign workers and these are essentially this is a separate population so they have a lot of cases uh but it's confined to the dorms uh because they actually do not interact much with the rest of the population in singapore but what will happen if you have a bridge between those dorms and the community so the really the patterns of human co-presence are truly essential now how can we make uh some of these places less vulnerable that's that's a tricky question if you use large-scale network-based models of human compressors for instance uh along with big data that can help us chart how people within a particular location connect and interact the idea of doing you know population contact tracing is i think almost impossible in practice to do uh but if you have this kind of of simple models of co presents you know coupled with specific epidemiological models then you have the potential to identify uh what we can call super spreader locations places uh where there is a high risk of transmission and this will also help the governments in terms of having targeted measures right now what we have around the world at least in singapore is a blanket ban you know lockdowns for everyone but obviously not all places are created equal and not all places deserve to be under lockdown so those models could actually help in two ways uh first to avoid you know what some people call the virus fatigue which is going to wear out communities and cause people to lower the guard against the disease but also i help the government optimize in terms of deploying resources to the places that really need to be that i consider deliverable and dangerous yeah thank you roland this pretty much goes out to thomas in summary of two questions by rajiv as well as max kohler the question goes does the maintenance of green buildings use much resources and generate more waste with technologies such as ai driven ai driven systems mitigate this it's actually a great question uh for the research that we do and it's it's particularly if i can you know uh bring the question to shri because she's the landscape architect uh on the on the team she has also worked with us on particularly those questions uh construction and maintenance costs uh that are affiliated with uh dance and green building typologies so shree if you don't mind would you like to say something about this the first the first question i think the second one we can we can take both the perception that maintenance of all these uh dense and green buildings is very expensive um it can be dealt with at a very initial stages of design um if they were very expensive you won't see so many of them being built you know so what we saw was that the projects which addressed the concerns of long-term maintenance access safety requirements if all these have been addressed up front in the design using very simple um inclusions like you know having access to the planting areas and making sure that you don't expect them to hang from gondolas to maintain them uh the general cost for maintenance has been uh quite reasonable because uh eventually the costs go high when you need um high skilled workers to maintain so if the maintenance regimen is similar to what you would do on the ground the costs are not very high so i think at the end of the day it also depends on how you detail and how you design these uh multi-level uh green systems yeah so i've i can i can take the second part of the the question which was on the use of technology right and ai uh we found in our research that often and architects have experimented with all sorts of ways for irrigation for example in in the dense and green buildings that we studied over the years and what we found is that it's often the the very simple details that do not require a lot of mechanical you know maintenance or any kind of technological uh component that worked the best so if you if you take for example o asia hotel downtown that we looked at a couple of times today the detail is really very simple you have a screen that is filled with creepers that grow through the screen and along the screen and there is on every level or every other level there's a planter box and anyone can go there and just water the plants right so it's that simple uh complicated technological systems they tend to fail that has to do with simply the scale of buildings and the fact that they're exposed to the elements i wouldn't exclude the possibility that they are very very smart systems that can help us i mean particularly in the realm of ai that we're only starting to explore what the possibilities are but the experience with these buildings over the last couple of years has actually shown that the simpler the detail the better it seems to work would you agree shree yeah i have to agree on that that it's it's actually about the detail if we can um put a little bit more time and effort in detailing these in the long run they are not as expensive or as difficult yeah i just like to add that very important is the balance between the inputs and the outputs what i want to say is that you get benefits with the greenery so you do a let's say a primary investment but let's say on the on the energetic performance of a building if you keep it technically on a on a very basic as thomas said on a basic level you can get a lot of energetic positive performance this is just what i want to say so you do you you give a monetary input at the beginning but you get a payback at the end and this is always you have to balance this when you when you start your planning and keep the details as easy as possible like thomas said so it's basically some kind of a cost-benefit analysis right from the beginning that's right yeah okay um for the next question is to do with food so this question by jayden the question goes addressing food security is one of the key national agendas at the moment can we integrate community scale food production seamlessly into green building design i'm going to give this a step i'll probably need a little bit of help from the rest especially on the technical parts but uh um i think definitely regards to sort of uh increasing um more domestic production of food in vertical cities in densities will be needed for any city and of course in particular cities like singapore where we depend a lot on sort of uh diverse uh channels for food supply um i think that's something singapore has um planned i think there's a the goal is about to hit 30 uh domestic production in the next couple of years but also i find help but see that home that ambition being able to co-mingle with this easily in a dense green city right because if you are have the ability to plan for vertical environments integrating greenery i think hence there might be a ability a natural ability to be able to then think about how can that greenery potentially be used for food um so i think that's going to be a very natural reality for all of us i feel that those things will become more common especially in situations increasingly and i'm in eventually it will become just part and parcel of how you live right just being able to step out of your high rise to a green patch and as well as to farm some some food yeah thank you mark um i know that stephen is very passionate about growing your own food as well stephen you have something to say about this yeah thanks for spotting my itchy finger there i like really uh i love growing vegetables um but that's not what my point i would just want to add to what mark was saying i think this is an immensely interesting area um singapore is really working hard on this and it has this very memorable policy goal of 30 of domestic food production by 2030. so 30 by 30. keep that in mind most people say it's incredibly difficult and very challenging to do that um and but what i find very interesting about it is it it's clearly what you can grow outside your window or even on more complex uh you know exoskeleton type structures you can kind of imagine coming out of the work that thomas and sasha have already sketched you can already see emerging models especially in some of the more speculative things that ohio is doing in the studio it's clear that this is not going to deliver you the efficiencies of industrialized food production so you're still going to have to be importing um you know from the giant rice farms all around asia the wheat from the u.s or australia and so on you simply can't compete at a local kind of fragmented sort of cottage industry level but at the higher end of the market the boutique and the very high value crops particularly if you have a very very short you know farm to farm to table sensitivity once logistics comes into you can get incredibly high value and i think economically very very relevant models for um for producing food much closer to the city itself and again one of the things that's that's emerged in the in the current pandemic um is precisely the like the length of the supply chains to cities all around the world but especially singapore where the city boundary is also a national boundary so there's a huge amount of work being going on with the singapore food a agency modelling these kinds of supply chains and i would just underline despite all of this singapore still ranks number one in the world for food security quite amazing it's being it's being eroded rapidly by the covert situation so it's dropping down very quickly but nonetheless it's still number one in the world so it's quite an amazing situation i think this direction is very very very exciting so thanks for asking me to tune in on that topic you're welcome geraldine can i say something to this uh i think when when singapore is referring to 30 by 30 of course you cannot achieve this with the kind of community uh urban farming that we saw in the case of kutek quad hospital right i mean that just adds to food coming from from somewhere else but i think a goal like this can only be achieved through very interesting use of of technology right often these farms are entirely inside of buildings they're artificially led so that is actually an area where a lot of technology advancements take place so there are all sorts of interesting things that are explored right now and it is it is quite different from you know the greenery that we have referred to in uh in the presentation even though there is as i said and we see this with the student projects in the university when uh students get to own uh to choose their own topic for let's say a thesis project there's a tremendous interest in the younger generation in exploring uh you know food production urban farming as a topic in architecture and landscape architecture thank you very much thomas the next question i believe goes out to roland this is about movement of people so what else should we consider when designing cities for walkability in terms of land use how should city planners in order to make a city more livable be able to encourage better interface between different projects not only horizontally but also vertically a great great question so i i i'm afraid all of us are going to sound like we're promoting singapore and doing publicity for what the the government is doing but it's true that there are many uh this is already something going on in singapore trying to improve walkability uh and the distribution of parks and how you move as i said how we move in in three dimensions so let me just touch on this particular question because i think you know singapore is doing something different and it's easy to understand so if you go to another big asian city let's say you go to shenzhen or some other place in hong kong for instance typically moving up and down means that you are taking an elevator right between the top of a skyscraper to the the ground floor and uh simple as that so your vertical movement is limited and often just based on an elevator ride but in singapore you have a different use of the vertical dimension thomas shown the um the component mirror t building where you can gradually go from one floor to another by you know being outdoor walking outdoor so that reduces the use of air conditioning for instance at the same time you are enjoying greenery so this is this is something that we could promote on the larger scale at the city level where different buildings like that will be integrated there are some some examples uh in place in singapore where you have a multi stations connected to shopping centers that are connected to hospitals for instance i think about jurong east uh and where the government is trying to also have you know the pedestrians have access without the cars being around and all the traffic being uh being separated the car traffic being separated so your experience would be better because you enjoy walking more if you are not you know surrounded by cars if you don't have the exhaust from the cars on the top of that it improves the connectivity between buildings so there is indeed a lot of work that can be done but this has to be done as i said not just at the building level it has to be integrated at the district level um across um uh different plots and this is where you know the government governments have to be involved because only they can essentially help facilitate that take place between different different plots when they do a new district development for instance so there is a real uh possibility to bring down the density by having people working at different levels accessibility is the big big trigger so if we if we can engage planners if you can engage also the authorities and even even the the the investors in this sense then we need really to talk about accessibility of a building because usually buildings are privatized and it's is it the common space the green space is it is it a public space which makes it a lot more difficult and i think here's a kind of a trigger here we have to to debate it and we have to be open-minded because here new models come up of accessibilities of buildings in the in the future if in singapore you have a lot of very good examples about about this let's say open space and open accessible buildings but not all of them not all of them are and this i think is is a challenge is a challenge for the future we have to think about that thank you sasha okay i think we have a final question how do we design for safety i think especially in the time of pandemic which we're all experiencing now our lives have changed drastically in the past few months how can we design for safety and for resilience yeah just to riff a little bit on the last uh thread um i think safety ends it ends up in a slightly narrow area you know of health and safety but i think resilience is a very interesting uh topic and i was just thinking a little bit about what roland was saying um you know we end up we do end up reflect reflecting a lot in these kinds of environments about the the amazing things that have been done in singapore but when you come to nature it is quite interesting to see where the limits are because singapore as a city-state um increasingly has to start to think in a way about asean as a larger ecosystem so i think many i was reading some of the the threads in in the book so if you look at bird migration species for example they're not living within the bounds of the nation state of singapore of course these are these are long-distance travelers sometimes um so in a way singapore uh is starting then in that respect thinking about this broader question of nature and resilience it started to become a part considering itself much more within a kind of regional ecology and i think that's typical for an outlook of a nation state that has a lot of land um like the united states or europe for example or australia but singapore has to think itself much more as a kind of um as a kind of archipelago in this larger kind of framework of nature and i think that's also starting to emerge in the way singapore is is often taking a very progressive role in asean so transnational associations and of course this has a this has an ecological dimension for those of you who live in singapore we know that we suffer this very complicated you know process of the haze which is a trans-border ecological disaster and i think if you scale it up to kind of the level of coded we have to be thinking across trans-border logics and i think they're paying attention to nature um slightly beyond the scale of the building and the urban plot starts to become very very interesting and i think very important to the bigger question of relevance of resilience thank you um i noticed that three has a response as well and on top of what you're going to respond i'm going to piggyback one last question which i think is probably meant for you how do you think other parts of the world can follow singapore's examples do you believe that legislations should change and consider integration of green space in new buildings first is the first response in terms of the safety it's quite an interesting component like you know how your view safety kind of changes depending on what becomes a factor to be safe from right i know when we were designing these buildings for a long time the safety was more about how to make sure that people are safe when they maintain these buildings or how do you make sure that construction time the safety is managed and now the safety aspect has moved to health hygiene interaction um you know even um co-location whether it's safe so um i think for us it needs to be more adaptable be able to change be able to respond i think that is where uh safety aspect comes in for singapore because it's not as straightforward as a blanket way of dealing with safety and in terms of singapore example of green yes of course there needs to be legislation changes and the reason why we see these kind of dense and green integrated buildings in singapore i have to say uh was triggered by the change in policies like lush like skyrise greenery like you know the green mark the leaf area index the need for green plot ratios so there needs to be a change in legislation and policies to make sure that it kind of uh in a way forces people to think about new way of designing these buildings and integrating green space um and over the span of time when people start looking at um the value it adds i think it becomes a practice you don't need legislation after that you would do it because it gives you the benefits um so yes if you have to change i think the first step is to make sure that there is a policy change there is a legislation change to how you design buildings in the first place thank you i think with that we will wrap up the q a and i would like to invite each panelist to give a closing statement one liner about what's the key takeaway from the discussion and the presentations uh this evening so maybe um can i start with thomas okay thank you geraldine uh in my case it's not a one-liner it's a multi-multi-liner i think developing compact cities with extensive greenery and highly livable environments is really a very important strategy in addressing rapid urbanization i think innovative dense and green design in my opinion can contribute significantly to the creation of attractive and ecologically balanced urban environments by offering a wide range of urban architectural environmental social and economic benefits and i think the benefits also include a higher level of resilience in a situation like the one we're in right now it might not help directly with the virus when you're infected but certainly to survive the situation you know not to die from cabin fever it is really important to be in an environment that is dense as singapore but at the same time allows us to go out and reach a green space very very quickly i think that makes a huge uh difference in terms of resilience of the city thank you thomas may i next invite mark to give a closing statement since thomas did it i'll give a few lines and not just one line um i think one thing is people actually still i would have taken away from this whole thing is people will still want to interact and enjoy the city but they also now want to feel safe so the challenge actually now is actually how do you create those same dynamic desired experiences while also upholding all these new guidelines that we'll see formed in the year in the months to come on the years to come but generally people may not visit spaces if their experiences promises to be stressful but i also believe that as more people still want to move to cities for opportunities then people also work more from home and hence like now after sitting at your desk for the entire day looking at your screen on your breaks or at the end of the day we actually need green spaces to easily get too quickly beyond the planned trip to the nature reserve the 10 to 15 minute walk in and out of the city so i believe that there'll be a need actually in my view there's a need for a wider range of nature spaces made accessible to people in terms of size perhaps character and of course programming and these could be places for 1 2 5 10 or 100 people to escape to to enjoy the outdoors because more people will want to go to the outdoors now uh to be enjoyed quickly or longer but most importantly this new thing about safely yeah thank you mark um i think we should then move on to the landscape architects three what's your response i have to agree to the points which thomas and mark have already said but for me the the key aspect is that the value of having uh green open spaces a close proximity where you can just step down and be able to reach um is something um which has been more pronounced in the current situation than before and we tend to start valuing every bit of green space which we have around us um so while we um are addressing all these challenges of the pandemic i also see on a positive note that there are quite interesting uh positives to take from uh like there is community resilience which we have seen we've seen spatial adaptability we've seen improved environmental quality we've seen vibrant biodiversity um there is an increased awareness of health and hygiene and also there is a fostering of a sustainable lifestyle so um all these are forced temporary transformations but it might just encourage equitable and sustainable urban future actually um and in a way accelerate the global response to larger issues of uh climate change and global warming thank you sri um zooming out as you mentioned global issues um perhaps we can have roland give the next statement thank you all right so uh i'll be very short just two words uh interdisciplinary design okay let me elaborate a bit i think the solution to all these problems is to bring you know architects uh designers scientists complexity scientists you know uh uh ecological scientists you bring them together right to design a better city you you read in a newspaper now that you know because of kovid right people are essentially fleeing cities and considering their new life in going out of city i just don't believe in that i i don't buy it i think you know for sure you know some cities are fully designed and they don't have a high quality of living but a well-designed cities with you know greenery where you can meet your friends and it's a fantastic city so but that's that requires uh good design uh interdisciplinary design so i'll close with this thank you very much and i think the next natural person to respond to interdisciplinary design would be steven yes um well it's it's been a super interesting um evening you can see dusk going down outside my window for me the the really exciting aspects are in a way this kind of format this is a kind of meeting that we could not possibly have had if we'd all flown taken flights although we'd love to host you all in singapore and we could have shown you a really great time there's fantastic food fantastic public spaces but in a way we all know carbon footprint all kinds of other financial issues simply don't make that possible so i think there's a kind of emerging kind of spider density which becomes super interesting and we all have had those headaches right where you get this very very sort of intense zoom experience i think it's the beginning of another kind of urban experience it doesn't deny the other one but the two are kind of inter interlinked and the fact that we can talk to people you know like sasha in switzerland and here and everybody else online i think is starting to point the way to another kind of density and i think mark alluded to it as well that density has to be embedded in the physical density of the house and if you don't happen to have a very nice house if it's just one room and you happen to have young children there and you happen to be the woman who typically looks after the household then this is a very very stressful environment so the cyber physical future world is not so it's not so so much fun so i think we have to think about the domestic very very ordinary density plus the new possibilities of this kind of density i'm an architect so i'm always a little bit upbeat about this so um i'm looking forward to the next discussion thanks again thank you stephen for your upbeat final closing statement and sasha your closing statement please yes thank you to all of you with your final statements which i absolutely absolutely agree and i wanted to point more on on the rollouts on honor's final statements and of course you did it and i don't have to repeat it and i'm happy hold on that we will be working together in the future but what i want to say is that since 1950 and nowadays in the last 70 years in europe especially in switzerland housing space private space has increased about 30 percent so houses get bigger and in the last 10 years i experienced that housing space decreases because of price the price of the of the land and i think we're going to do a big mistake making our houses smaller i think exactly now we experience what it is steven in his house is a happy man me and my apartment which has different spaces to to go to is is fantastic so the question of the experience expand to expand green space into the vertical in especially in asia in europe a little bit less but this is a is a dramatic important there's a dramatic important question and we have really to rethink our real estate ideas i'm talking to the developers and i'm talking also to the people in in governments releasing the rules how we have to build in the future so this this for my opinion will be one of the real big challenges and the other one is if we introduce the greenery into our houses into the vertical we have even to rethink our relation to nature it's a different nature we have as it is outside of our buildings goodbye from switzerland thank you very much thank you for having me in this discussion thank you thank you very much to all the panelists um the truth is today's topics have been extremely diverse and we still have many questions that we cannot answer in this two-hour webinar so firstly we would like to apologize we are deeply sorry that they are still open questions but what we are extremely happy about is that this session has provoked questions to question the status quo and to challenge your imagination so we would like to thank all of you for joining us this evening or this morning wherever you are from and hope that you have gained some interesting insights almost finally as much as we cannot see every one of you in this virtual environment the sharing the lively discussion and the energy is real so thank you very much for sharing this evening or your morning with us um i would like to thank especially our superheroes behind the scene so if everything has been running pretty smoothly they are because it's just because they're superheroes behind doing all this work um working tirelessly to make this event happen so special thanks goes out to daniel wong from sutd and janine liu from design singapore council and also to the rest of the design singapore team a very very big thank you to you this is um i've said all my thanks i wish you a very very pleasant evening ahead keep well good night and hope to see you again soon thank you thank you thank you you

Channel: DesignSingapore Council

Views: 4,147

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Id: 1S-6xtggwQo

Length: 114min 54sec (6894 seconds)

Published: Mon May 18 2020