The Singapore urban model on offer

Straits Times 8 Jan 09;

THE World Bank's expertise-sharing agreement with Singapore to tap the city state's urban development model for use in growing nations is recognition that it has something unique to teach in liveability. It is a natural progression from the various forms of technical assistance, in manpower training and systems engineering for example, that Singapore has provided developing nations for many years.

Attap huts in the swamps of Bukit Ho Swee and many other insanitary squatter areas have given way in little time to modern homes and offices in a clean, well-planned and vibrant metropolis. This has been one standard snapshot of Singapore's transformation.

The United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN Habitat) discovered last year that Singapore is the only city in the world without slums - certainly something to celebrate, considering that about 6 per cent of urban areas in even more developed countries are slums.

The World Bank's urban-hub arrangement with the Republic will now allow Singapore to share essentials in sustainable urban development - namely, efficiency and conservation in energy use, water management, air pollution control, and planning and policy. There should be no lack of countries wanting to partake of the programme. There are more than 400 cities with populations of at least a million each, up from only 16 in 1900. Hundreds of millions of people migrate from rural to urban areas every year, increasing the demand for land, water and jobs, and challenging the capacity of cities to remain liveable and free of social tension.

Apart from being completely slum-free, Singapore is the only country that the UN Development Programme lists in its annual Human Development Index as being 100 per cent urban. Developing countries that still have sizeable rural populations will need to take away or adapt only ideas and approaches relevant to their particular needs. One size, certainly, does not fit all in urban solutions. Even though development experts no longer consider rural-urban population drift to be as big a problem as it was a few decades ago, many cities still face impossible pressures to provide basic services for new arrivals.

Singapore has been able to control immigration and carry out urban development in a systematic manner. Obviously, no single city has the answers to all urban liveability issues. The training of self-generating local expertise to run systems based on Singapore's model is essential for the programme to be completely useful to recipient nations. This is after all a technology-transfer exercise, not a matter of cloning successes.