(electronic music)
(ethereal electronic music)
We can only imagine the Singapore of 2065.
But we do know that by 2065,
Singapore must be a very different place than it is today.
In its second half-century,
Singapore will face daunting challenges.
(dramatic music)
A rapidly growing and aging population,
a battle for economic survival,
and accelerating climate change.
How Singapore meets those challenges will decide its future.
Today our most innovative architects and urban planners
are envisioning radical solutions
that will transform the way we live.
(static buzzing)
The Singapore of the future will be the city of our dreams.
(funky electronic music)
Today, 54% of the world's population lives in urban areas.
By 2065, that percentage will be 80%.
Over 40 cities will have become mega-cities.
One of those mega-cities may be Singapore.
Most future mega-cities will house their growing populations
by expanding outward.
But not Singapore.
It's already built to the edges of
its 720 square kilometer island.
Since the 1950s to now we've reclaimed maybe
about 20% of our island's footprint.
But there is a limit.
We can't keep reclaiming land.
With so little land left,
Singapore needs to find a solution, and fast.
And that's what's led some of our visionary architects
to think where no one's thought before.
Because we have no way of expanding,
the only way to develop for Singapore is upwards.
It's not whether we go vertical or not,
it's just how are we gonna go vertical.
Schirin Taraz and Alina Yeo
are architects at the firm WOHA.
They believe that living high in the sky is
the only solution to Singapore's future population growth.
They call their concept the Vertical City
and insist it can't be just a set of taller skyscrapers,
but simply reproduces existing building types
and extends them into the sky.
In their view, only a radical new vision
of high rise tropical living
can achieve a livable future Singapore whose people may live
their lives 60 or even 100 stories in the sky.
The Vertical City will have to convince tens of thousands of
people to do something human beings have never done before.
Spend their lives as much as 500 meters above the earth.
Not an easy task since many Singaporeans
can only imagine a vertical city as a kind
of giant public housing block in the sky.
The typical high rise that we have
as of now is very mono functional.
So you either live in it or you work in it.
If you always stack the same thing one on top of the other,
on top of the other, on top the other, it is so monotonous.
Your environment is not exactly inspiring.
(upbeat music)
We know that we have all the capacities
to build very high buildings.
We have a capacity to make high speed lifts
that will deliver people to those elevated places.
But whether anybody would want
to live in one of those spaces.
What would be the mental health?
Do we really know what it means to live in one
of these efficient, elevated spaces in the sky?
It's so easy to get seduced into thinking that mega cities
are about mega structures, and they're not.
They are about the human being that lives
in each of this mega buildings.
That's where we need to start thinking
as we become more and more into mega cities
with higher density and taller buildings.
People tend to get more isolated in their living conditions.
They prefer privacy over community
and it's incumbent almost upon
the architects or the planners
to create spaces where people need to come together.
We want to bring it down to very fundamental questions.
How can we build in such a way that our buildings
are liked by the people inhabiting them?
(dramatic music)
Designing a home in the sky for an earthbound
species will be challenging enough, but the Vertical City's
architects must also create a home for all Singaporeans.
For all of history, multiethnic city dwellers have dealt
with the tensions caused by cultural differences,
by living apart in their own neighborhoods.
Singapore succeeded in mixing its diverse cultures when
it introduced HDB housing in the late 1960s.
And Vertical City advocates are confident
that success will continue.
We took a very careful approach to make sure that
the different races and of different culture
will be able to intermix within that particular development.
Today we built public housing of 55 stories.
They are all designed with a mind of mixing
the different ethics culture so that they
can blend together and not have any segregation.
So, to build 100 stories is no different.
But the Vertical City's people won't just
be ethnically diverse, many of them will also be old.
Singapore's population is rapidly aging.
In 2065, one out of two may be over 65.
Experts wonder how will a record number
of elderly cope with life in a vertical city.
A city which is well designed
for an aging population is a well designed city full stop.
To try and design for the city
that really includes everybody.
As designers, it's a reminder in the way in which cities,
historically, the best cities, are inclusive cities.
Socially inclusive cities.
The architects of Singapore's
future must create a new world.
There's no model for what must be done,
so the architects are envisaging a radical shift
away from the traditional apartment block.
I guess it would have to influence some spots.
While pondering how high
future buildings must go.
WOHA's Vertical City prototype would house
five million people over 45 square kilometers.
The population density would be
approximately 100,000 people per square kilometer.
That's 10 times more people than
Singapore's city center today.
Living in buildings that would tower
over Singapore's current skyline.
A multilayered, multifunctional mega structure.
And a massive concentration of humanity.
But experts believe that despite its size,
the Vertical City could also be a community.
This could really a functioning like urban compounds
or in villages where you organize them such that they have
easy access to a communal floor where you may have some
basic amenities, both for the young and the old.
Creating urban villages
in the sky will require recreating today's living spaces,
hundreds of meters above the ground.
So it's critical we better understand how
we use and connect these new, elevated neighborhoods.
By its hundredth birthday, Singapore will have designed
and built something never tried before.
An urban infrastructure some hundred stories high.
But how will its residents like living in the sky?
When Singapore turns 100 in the year 2065,
tens of thousands of Singaporeans
will be living hundreds of meters in the sky.
And Singapore's landscape will be dominated by a new
and radical urban structure; the Vertical City.
Without doubt, 100 story buildings will make
Singapore's future skyline an awesome site.
But what will it feel like to call
these mega structures home?
If the Singapore of 2065 will be housing its people high in
the sky, it will have to give them more than just shelter.
The Vertical City must be a livable city,
and that's the biggest challenge
for those designing Singapore's future.
Designers will have to address our deep
and powerful need to feel connected to the ground.
There's something intrinsically human about moving over
the horizontal plane because as humans beings
we still can only walk horizontally
and the whole vertical movement is not quite ours.
And so all communication areas, congregation areas,
communal spaces are typically horizontal.
You stroll along a boulevard,
you walk along a street, you walk along a river, you walk.
You hardly ever have deep and meaningful conversations
as you climb the stairs or are in a lift.
So, those horizontal spaces as community and public spaces
are absolutely crucial for human beings to live together.
To create a livable city
that attracts residents from the ground into
the sky will require a radical shift in thinking.
Trained for planning in two dimensions on the ground,
future urban planners will have to envision entire
neighborhoods relocated from the horizontal plane of Earth,
into the vertical dimension of sky.
For the first time, they'll have
to think in the third dimension.
You have to elevate current urban planning,
which is still a very two dimensional way
of looking at the city.
You have to elevate that into the third dimension.
So, we can no longer say this is an industrial zone
and this is an agricultural zone and this
is a residential zone, because I think all these things
need to be stacked vertically on top of each other.
Was this one an idea of--
This is an idea of overlay.
The architects envisage layers of public space
interspersed with residential
and commercial layers within the structure.
A vertical city really has multiple layers.
So we're talking about multiple ground levels.
On which we then have maybe a residential component,
then maybe on another layer we have an office component.
On an interim layer maybe we have the schools.
On another layer maybe we have healthcare facilities.
So rather than the conventional city that is spread out,
we're taking the city and we're stacking it vertically.
But, do the experts know how
the residents will react to this new layered space?
(light electronic music)
When we're thinking about future cities,
we have to really understand how people operate,
how people are physiologically, but we also have to think
about how people are cognitively,
that is how their brains process their own presence in
cities in relation, in crowds or in isolated situations.
This is no trivial fact because
we're inventing a new kind of public space.
These are the eye tracker glasses.
There are three cameras.
One's outside and there are two cameras down here.
To better understand how the human brain might
process a complex new environment,
researchers turn to the closest multifunctional
and multilayered space available; shopping malls.
One element of that research
is to use what is called eye tracking glasses.
These are glasses that have little cameras that record
the movement of the eyes and tell you where people have been
looking, what elements in the environment they have seen
and what may be vital information they have overlooked.
Another set of tools that is now emerging
is to use physiological data on the move.
That is, to measure for example the skin conductance,
which is a sign of stress or arousal,
to measure heart rate while you're moving around.
So your goal destination is this free store located
on the third level of this building.
Please do not use any maps.
So we're studying spacial cognition.
That's how people navigate an environment,
how they learn new places, how they remember places they've
been before, how they make choices.
Then in particular we're looking on multilevel
environments like shopping malls or complex buildings.
So where people have not only to find the way in one
dimension, the horizontal dimension,
but also vertically because this is more complex
and people use different strategies
and different heuristics to find their way.
Recording how we experience and mentally map
a multilevel cityscape allows researchers to develop
designs that better accommodate the flow of people.
Where do people look?
What do they pay attention to?
What is important to them?
Some of us look more at people,
some of us look more at displays,
some of us look more at signs.
If you look at sufficiently many people
and integrate that data, you find specific patterns.
The overarching question for us is how do people behave
and how do people experience the build environment.
Urban living can be very stressful
if the environment is not designed right.
If they look around, they might see that
there's a corridor here, so they might pick this one.
If you're looking at these points.
Architects and urban planners can use our insights
to make better decisions about the design
of buildings and about the structure of city layout.
You don't want to live in a box.
You want to live in an interesting urban environment.
But how will architects recreate
interesting urban environments
in the sky where space will be at a premium?
How will they design a vertical environment
that guarantees its residents the same freedom to move,
they would have on the ground.
In 2015, WOHA debuted a new vertical living concept
that might be the model for Singapore's future.
Public housing projects SkyVille on Dawson organizes
living space into a series of stacked villages.
Grouped around green areas called sky gardens.
They breakdown the overall volume into towers.
And these towers by themselves
are broken down into smaller neighborhoods.
So, once you reach a critical number,
they would put a sky garden, you know,
that the people that live around that area can share.
We wanted to test out was the question
of creating community spaces at great height.
Each of them contains 80 homes and you can kinda feel like
you, psychologically you feel you can know your neighbors
when you're one in 80 versus when you're one in 1,000.
That's the kind of sense of community
and ownership and shared space that you can have.
You can look down on your village green
or your sky garden and be able to see your neighbors.
Your children have play there,
you can call them back for dinner and things like that.
Horizontally linking
the layers created more living space.
A strategy WOHA employed on a larger scale
in its Vertical City prototype.
And as we get more vertical,
it is also very crucial to become more horizontal.
In the Vertical City, the ground layer
multiplies upward into massive horizontal platforms.
The horizontal platforms are built
every 20 stories to provide public spaces
and transportation normally found on the ground.
Underground subways are elevated into the sky.
For instance you could have a whole public street that
interconnects different buildings and people can get from
this building of this development to the other one
and that could incorporate your public transport systems.
So, the version of the MRT that we have today could take
on other forms of people mover systems
that bring you from point to point.
In a way the connectivity between
the buildings where they're at different levels.
Diagonally or horizontally,
it's an important aspect of vertical cities.
That can be through walkways, that could through roads,
that could be through light rail connecting between
all the different buildings to make sure that mobility
between these few buildings are enhanced.
But replicating and connecting
a horizontal world in a vertical city won't be easy.
Designing sky living to be as livable as possible
will require more than just creating and linking space.
It will mean understanding how human beings experience
and move through their living space.
What do you see?
I saw people walking around the landing.
Do you like this street?
Uh, if there's no car, it's fine.
To do this as economically as possible,
a team at Future City Laboratories is carrying out
virtual reality research that could help
architects develop their concepts.
Active mobility basically deals with all the active
forms of transport like walking and cycling.
What we're trying to understand through our research here,
how can we design better cycling infrastructures
so that people make the choice to cycle.
Oh, I prefer this part. -: Why?
Yeah, no pedestrians, no cars.
Virtual reality goes beyond
simply visualizing possible futures.
By immersing volunteers in virtual worlds,
it allows architects to test out concepts
and discover their flaws before designs become reality.
Take the 3d mod from the buildings, the street,
the new design, and the simulation
with all the cars, bicycles, motorists,
cyclist and I combine all that into a game engine
that allows us to create a virtual reality experience.
It gives you the sense that you're in this virtual world
and that whatever you're doing is gonna have repercussions.
You can bike through redesign cycling
and then we can understand people's reactions
to these newly designed streets.
I hope you enjoyed your experience.
As cities evolve and they get more vertical,
we're going to encourage people to have an exercisable
environment, and that's what we're trying to achieve here.
Second of straightaways, the bicycling lanes?
Yes. -: Yes, I will.
And we want to also understand how this remains a viable,
attractive mode of transportation and is not in conflict
with all the new future mobility systems.
So that's the larger goal of the project.
By 2065, the Vertical City could be well
on its way from today's radical visionary concept,
to the new normal for thousands of Singaporeans,
and a solution to Singapore's growing population.
But only if its designers can eliminate a dangerous flaw.
They've discovered that their city in the sky
has a dark side, and that it could actually
do a future Singapore more harm than good.
In the year 2065, when Singapore celebrates
its 100th independence day, the Singapore skyline
may be dominated by vertical cities.
Homes to thousands of people,
living hundreds of meters in the air.
These vertical cities could solve Singapore's
population problem, but they could also make
another problem much worse; climate change.
Until 2065, we should be seeing a rise
in both average temperatures as well as for maximum
temperatures and minimum temperatures.
The bottom line is Singapore is gonna get hotter.
Winston Chow has been studying the
ramifications of climate change on Singapore and the region.
(dramatic music)
Currently, the maximum temperatures we can expect
to get in Singapore is about 35 degrees Celsius.
It's likely that it'll increase to higher,
maybe 36, 37 degrees.
So, if you were to stay outdoors when these sort
of temperatures hit, you will be having a greater
likelihood of heat stress or heat stroke.
Singapore's location
on the equator already makes it hot.
But as its become more urbanized, it's become even hotter.
Many of its skyscrapers are copies
of structures in the west.
While the classic skyscraper works well
in the colder climates of the U.S. and Europe,
it's not appropriate for Singapore's tropical conditions.
So the skyscraper is developed to be as compact
as possible, which makes sense in temperate climate
and in environment where you largely want
to separate outdoor air from indoor air.
Those typologies were not meant for the tropics in the first
place, and you could not really tell the difference whether
that building was standing in Shanghai or New York or
Singapore, even though it's a completely different climate.
The air conditioning needed to cool the
interiors of large closed buildings, contributes to
a dangerous phenomenon called the urban heat island.
When you convert a rainforest to a city,
so you've got buildings and you've got roads,
what happens is that you trap in more heat,
and this heat gets reradiated out, especially at night,
on top of whatever waste heat that
is generated by air conditioning,
and this contributes to a more warm urban
environment compared to your rural surroundings.
Dr. Heiko Aydt has spent 10 years in Singapore.
For the last four years, he's been investigating
how to diminish the urban heat island effect.
In Singapore, it's a very pressing issue.
We are at the equator, it's pretty hot here anyway,
and in Singapore the urban heat island
effect is completely negative.
In other cities in other parts of the world the urban
heat island effect may have some positive effects.
In winter for instance it could
be a bit warmer and not as cold.
There are several factors.
One of course is radiation.
At the moment we can feel that the sun is shining,
it feels quite hot, that's radiation.
The building, during the day they exposed to sunlight,
they heat up, and night they're basically
releasing this heat into the environment.
And another part that's contributed by the people
who live there and our economic activities.
Take traffic as an example.
Roughly 20% of Singapore's overall energy
consumption goes into the transport sector.
All this energy is released in form of waste heat.
If you're lucky there's wind and it somehow dissipates.
But, if you're not so lucky,
it also gets trapped in the city.
If you have a lot of high rise buildings close
to each other, you have those air conditioning units.
Each of them is producing some
waste heat and hot air rises up.
And therefore, with each floor the air conditioning unit
has to work harder and harder to cool down the inside.
Of course, if it works harder,
this means it needs to consume more energy.
There is a vicious cycle if you use a lot of air
conditioning in Singapore to cool your indoor environment,
all that waste heat goes out and you contribute to the heat
island, but how you power your air conditioning is primarily
through fossil fuels, so there is that indirect feedback
loop in which you use more fossil fuels and you contribute
to more greenhouse gas emissions that trap in more heat
in the atmosphere that causes climate change.
What we can do is make sure that we don't cause
the temperature in the city to be even higher
or to be increased even higher than what
it's already increased by climate change.
Even the most passionate advocates of vertical
cities acknowledge the gigantic air conditioned buildings,
housing thousands of people,
will make Singapore's urban heat island even hotter.
But what if those buildings could help lower
Singapore's temperature instead of raising it?
As it turns out, there's a very simple way that they can.
(upbeat music)
Researchers discovered that the temperature near trees
and vegetation in the city, was two to three degrees
lower than the temperature in areas without vegetation.
The greenery absorbs heat and provides shade.
As well as removing carbon gases
that contribute to climate change.
Greening Singapore has already proven beneficial.
Thanks to a national tree planting campaign in 1963,
Singapore is now known as a city in a garden.
50 years later, in 2013, WOHA took greening
a building literally to the next level.
In the PARKROYAL on Pickering, a test case for how
the vertical city of the future could
be kept cool without increasing the urban heat island.
This building incorporates 15,000 square meters
of greenery, which is twice the footprint of the plot
and roughly the same size as the adjacent park.
We integrated about over 50 different plant species
in these gardens and in these green features.
So by integrating greenery within
the building we achieved many things.
On one hand it helps to combat the urban heat island effect.
It also helps to shade the building in parts.
It also helps with entirely
different kind of nontechnical aspects.
The plants also provide psychological benefits.
For human beings to be surrounded by nature,
there's a connection called biophilia.
So, it's the love of anything natural around us,
and there's an inert need for us human beings to be
surrounded by nature be it either really as a view so
if you look out of the window to see some greenery,
or as a garden that you can literally walk into
and wander around in, smell flowers and et cetera,
has a massive impact on our wellbeing.
So, up to 50% of the corridors
here are naturally ventilated.
It's all part of a passive design strategy,
how we incorporate greenery as well as fresh air.
Like a natural ecosystem,
the plants don't consume any energy.
So all of these sky gardens are actually
self sustaining with minimal resources needed.
I think we'll definitely let it grow out some more,
but not in a sense of like overtaking the building entirely.
PARKROYAL demonstrates a greening
concept that could go mega in the future.
A future that could see nature
not only being added to designs, but driving design.
A new form of smart, climate sensitive architecture.
This pavilion was constructed
for Singapore's Future Of Us Exhibition in 2015.
Of course it was a great opportunity
for us to design a structure that also expresses
the idea of what the future might bring.
Local climatic conditions
dictated the design of the structure.
To replicate the complexities of the surrounding
environment, computers analyze that environment
to create the pavilion structure.
Computational design allows you to calibrate
the facade of a building very much
to the environmental forces that it is exposed to.
Computers not only shape
the overall facade, but designed each unique panel.
You see these panels,
they're all perforated in various ways.
Each piece reacts specifically
to the location that it sits in.
They stay closed in parts of the structure where you wanna
keep the sun out and they open up in areas where
you wanna bring in prevailing winds
to achieve a good cross ventilation.
So, it's almost like an artificial
foliage that you walk under.
We see there's a great potential for having smarter
buildings for the future that not necessarily use a lot
of technology, but technology is used up front.
Greening the Vertical City would cut down
its need for air conditioning, making it a livable space
for its residents, while not making the city hotter.
But futurists must do more to make
the Singapore of 2065 a livable city.
By then, a growing population will be creating travel
gridlock on a scale unimaginable today.
Unless the city reinvisions where its people live and work.
So the urban redevelopment authority has already begun
developing four regional centers,
where people can live and work
without commuting across town.
The reason why we actually have more regional centers
throughout the country is really to bring jobs
to be closer to where people live and by doing
so we can actually cut down the need for people's daily
commute between work and home, and in the process, reduce
traffic congestions between the city, and towards the city.
Many futurists believe that green architecture
and regional centers could make vertical cities
the solution to creating a livable Singapore.
But building energy friendly homes
for thousands in the sky won't be enough.
By 2065, resources will be extremely precious.
To be sustainable, it will critical
for the Vertical City to be smart.
(thunder booming)
As it enters its second half century,
Singapore is facing a looming crisis of expanding
urban growth and relentless climate change.
Those two challenges will put stress on the resources
the Vertical City will need to survive.
The Vertical City of the future will have
to do everything it can to sustain itself.
If you want to create a future that is livable,
then there's no other way then
to make it a sustainable future.
While sustainability really is to be able
to build them in a way that preserves resources
for the future generations as well.
(muffled children talking)
So thinking about the future by building sustainability
today, we need to be able to find models that people can
live in such a manner that not only they can live like
that for many years, but future generations.
Their children, their children's children
can still live in these environments.
Smart sustainability will be key
to designing and building a successful vertical city,
and not just in managing resource consumption,
the Vertical City itself must be smart.
By 2065, all of Singapore could be managed
by an integrated super app called Virtual Singapore.
A digital platform that will make it possible
to navigate the highly complex vertical city.
We virtualize everything about Singapore.
All the data about our life, our living.
Virtual Singapore is ambitious program.
It's something that we have not done,
and we look around, we don't find anyone doing,
so it is sometimes like pathfinding.
Virtual Singapore aims to build a 3d map
of Singapore by collating data previously scattered
in various government agencies, into a single platform.
Data that details the city's infrastructure;
it's buildings, roads and utilities.
The app designers are also developing
their own tools to aid mapping the city.
They're using hand phone cameras to take photographs
of precisely surveyed points
in the city like street lights and fire hydrants.
By triangulating those photographs using a computer
algorithm, they're able to precisely model the Virtual City.
(drone whirring)
Deploying drones allows them to add
the third dimension of height to their virtual model.
What we want to do is to bring together
in one single place all the 3d models of the city and in
that single place and platform that we provide a so called
common playground where we can produce applications on.
Virtual Singapore's applications will help city
planners and residents prepare for the future by combining
3d maps with real-time data to run simulations anticipating
problems like traffic congestion and water storage.
Planners will be able to design long-term strategies
for the city as well as manage more basic,
down to earth matters like new
cycleways and street lighting.
They'll also have access to a districts population density,
the number of solar panels
on its buildings and its energy use.
Residents could use the 3d tool to find
the best evacuation route during an emergency.
Parents could judge which path is safest for their children
to get to school, and planners could then add better
amenities among the most favored route.
When it's finished, Virtual Singapore will be a powerful
tool unprecedented in the history of city planning,
aiding Singapore's goal of becoming a truly smart city.
Traditionally, urban planning has almost
like an engineering kind of approach.
So you have different divisions
that look after different aspects of the city.
You look after transport.
You look after the height of a building.
You look after the sewer system.
You look after power supply.
You tick off one task after the other that you come to a
pragmatic solution, but not necessarily a good solution.
Everybody is looking after their specific task,
but we really need to start a planning approach that
is a lot more wholistic and where we try to combine
different things, combine infrastructures with architecture,
combine cycle paths with drainage, combine power plants
with industrial uses and that requires a different way
of thinking and requires a more wholistic approach
to planning to really come to more intelligent solutions.
The Vertical City can only
be implemented with wholistic thinking.
If wholistic planning
and sustainable architecture help Singapore overcome
the challenges facing it, the nation could become
a beacon for other mega cities in the region.
But, by 2065, climate change and urban overpopulation
will be threatening the whole world,
and the damage they do to cities and countries
thousands of miles away from Singapore,
will threaten Singapore's survival.
On its 100th birthday, Singapore will
be faced with more than its own local problems.
It will have to survive a changing world.
And its future may lie far beyond
the land and far beyond the sky.
(light dramatic music)