This Week I Learned: Singapore is a chessboard [2022–01–13]

Photo by Kirill Petropavlov on Unsplash

Some highlights:

• it’s was designed to raise the standard of living of its population, up to the expected maximum size still decades in the future
• it’s like a chessboard, with alternating high and low density squares
• the city areas are divided into “ranks”: the city into regions, regions into “new towns”, new towns into neighbourhoods, and neighbourhoods into precincts
• each has its own “town centre”, park, education and more: the biggest for the city, smaller for each region, and cascading smaller to the smaller “ranks” of area, so that you can always find something small or ordinary nearby and go further afield only for the bigger versions
• the expected durability of the concrete and steel guides the time horizon of plans

[You must have a] humanist’s heart, a scientist’s head, and an artist’s eye.

Watch Liu Thai Ker succinctly describe designing an entire city over a huge period of time: