New Building Techniques of Singapore

Transcript :

New Building Techniques of Singapore Narrator: Singapore has made much of its plans to become a model “green city” in the next millennium. Part of that includes the government’s commitment to its building program for public housing, working to five-year plans. And being in Singapore, new building techniques are continually being tried and tested.

Tay Kheng Soon: Well, this is a typical low cost house for Indonesia and this is a prototype. It's made of basically polystyrene panels with concrete spraye don the outside. Seismic-proof, earthquake-proof, hurricane-proof, and the main thing is that it be build by ordinary people. So, it's pretty solid and the basic material is this stuff which is poly styrene on the inside and wire meshstitched together and concrete is just sprayed on both sides. So you see thatthe structure is a monocot structure, the mesh goes right up forming the entireshell of the building as one integral unit.

That gives it strength. Narrator: And it's not just individual building materials that are being addressed, even its size, Singapore’s future ambitions would appear limited particularly architecturally. But its size seems to breed real innovation. Singapore is currently building a 350 hectare offshore land fil site to handle the next 50 years of its waste. And that ingenuity is alsore flected in planning possible city scapes for the next millennium.

Tay Kheng Soon: When you have big footprint cities, they smother the country side andreduce the bio diversity.

So therefore we should be thinking of cities with small foot prints. I mean this kind of thing where the contact between the city and the land is really tiptoeing onto the landscape. And you can imagine this as a rainforest. I mean here, you are seeing that sort of distance of about 30 meters. That’s the height of the rainforest canopy. And you -- what we have proposed here is a structure that’s one kilometer high. Of course, it's not going to be built in one go.

So, you could imagine a city starting off like this with relatively modestly size buildings, space quite widely apart with ream in between them, this could be ariver. This could be a hill. I mean the landscape really may not be touched at all. And you could even have agriculture here. You could have intensive aqua culture within the city itself, urban farming, as well as food production.

Narrator: Vision reinstatements like these give a clue to the rapid growth and likely continued success of  Singapore. It's this kind of approach that helped return the island into one of the major entrepreneurial city states of the late 20th century.

Singapore remains stoic despite the external pressure to turn down the degree of government control over its citizens. And thus far, it's also managed to definitely avoid the economic problems of its Asian neighbors. The real challenge for Singapore it seems will remain its ability to master and trade its market forces. That’s all for this week, join us again next week on Earth Report.(Source: Answer.com)