Straits Times 9 Jan 09;
IF THERE is one thing that Mr Goh Chye Boon wants to achieve with the Tianjin eco-city, it is to create a good living environment for residents of all income groups, and not just the rich.
Its 30 sq km plot of land is 40km from Tianjin's city centre, 150km from the capital Beijing, and surrounded by manufacturing activity from various industrial zones.
Its location allows it to attract not only executives and workers from nearby factories as residents, but also those living in congested areas in the Tianjin city centre and Beijing, explains the CEO of the Sino-Singapore Tianjin Eco-City Investment and Development Company.
The target: to build all types of housing for 350,000 residents over the next 15 years, with good public transport connections such as a light rail link to the Tianjin city centre.
Mr Goh explains: 'We are most focused on creating homes where people can put down roots and not just for investment. Hence, you must have the whole spectrum of the population because different parts of the population perform different roles in a city.'
To put the 'eco' in 'eco-city', the various types of public housing and private homes will be designed according to building codes similar to Singapore's green-mark rating system, which encourages developers to incorporate environmentally friendly and energy-saving features in buildings.
Singapore agencies like the Housing and Development Board and the Building and Construction Authority are working with their counterparts in China to develop such green housing.
Other eco-city projects being developed elsewhere in China and the world - like the one in Dongtan off Shanghai - have touted cutting-edge ecological features such as a zero-emissions building design.
But Mr Goh feels such solutions are not practical for a rapidly urbanising China that has to solve the problem of how to house large numbers of people.
'All of us are thinking the same thing - how to develop cities in a sustainable way, reduce carbon, make better use of water and renewable energy - but you can go to the extremes of pushing for all these and then create a high-cost city that very few people can afford,' he argues.
This is where he thinks Singaporean pragmatism gives the Tianjin eco-city an advantage. 'We put in place down-to-earth, practical ideas because we believe these ideas can make it affordable for Chinese residents.'
Apart from building homes, the Tianjin eco-city is also seeking to develop its own economic activity in the form of business parks, and hopes to attract companies in environmental services such as waste management and the provision of clean water.
Next year, it will start building its first business park on 30ha of land, which when ready could create 10,000 to 15,000 jobs and become another compelling reason for Chinese urbanites to move to the eco-city, says Mr Goh.
Construction of the eco-city will be in stages, with an initial start-up area of 4 sq km to be completed in three to five years.
In the next few months, developers will start work on the first one-third (around 100ha) of this start-up area. Another 100ha of development projects have either been secured or are being negotiated.
While the global financial crisis has seen many multinational companies shutting down factories and slowing production in China's export-driven regions, he does not think that Tianjin will be hard hit as much of its production is for domestic consumption.
Nor does he think potential investors in the eco-city will be put off by a slump in the business cycle as environmentally sustainable economic development is a 'longer-term priority that developing countries, especially China, cannot afford not to invest in'.
The Qatar Investment Authority is planning to take a minority stake in the Singapore half of the eco-city joint venture.
Beijing recently announced a 4 trillion yuan (S$868 billion) fiscal stimulus package for its economy, and one of the key thrusts of this package is public housing. That will lead to the building of more such housing to meet demand, which can only help the eco-city, says Mr Goh.
CLARISSA OON
Mr Eco-city goes the extra mile
Straits Times 9 Jan 09;
Mr Goh Chye Boon, chief executive officer of the China-Singapore joint-venture company set up to develop an eco-city in Tianjin, China, talks about the project's aims and how it will incorporate high environmental standards
By Clarissa Oon
TWO years ago, Mr Goh Chye Boon set about convincing four million Singaporeans to smile in a campaign leading up to the International Monetary Fund (IMF)-World Bank meetings.
No challenge was too great for the then-executive director of the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS), who pulled out all the stops to host and impress top finance officials from around the world during their week-long pow-wow here in September 2006.
Now deputy secretary in charge of special projects at the Ministry of Trade and Industry (MTI), the 38-year-old has established himself as the civil service's point man on high-stakes commercial projects. Singapore's first Formula One (F1) race last year was also his baby.
These days, you will not find him at his desk at MTI, but deep in the industrial heartland of China - specifically, in the northern manufacturing city of Tianjin, where he is working with Chinese and international partners to build a flagship 30sq km eco-city.
But whether in China or on home turf, the same principle applies for the energetic civil servant: Make a 'personal effort to connect' with every stakeholder and get him involved.
'Definitely, you need everybody on board and you must be able to convince people that the shared goals are the same before you can get there,' says the freshly minted chief executive officer of the China-Singapore joint-venture company behind the eco-city.
Mr Goh's office in Tianjin looks out onto a barren, frost-covered site - northern China is facing one of its harshest winters in years.
With the first flush of spring, pile drivers will move in to build the eco-city's first residences and offices. Over the next 15 to 20 years, affordable housing, public transport and services, all built and run according to high environmental standards, are expected to take shape.
The goal is to develop a model of environmental sustainability for future Chinese cities, as the downside of China's economic miracle has been smoggy skies, waste-choked rivers and way too many cars on the road.
In for the long haul
In keeping with his hands-on style of management, Mr Goh has insisted that he and his 30-strong Singaporean team make Tianjin, rather than Singapore, their base.
At some point, he is prepared to uproot his wife, a finance professional, and their two young sons, aged three and six. The family will personally test out the eco-city by becoming one of its first residents.
'I will likely invest in one home because I think the best way to get to the heart of (the development's effectiveness) is if you feel comfortable when you stay there,' he tells Insight, looking excited at the prospect.
The eco-city is a 50-50 joint venture between a Chinese consortium and a Singapore consortium.
The Chinese consortium is led by Tianjin Teda Investment Holding Company - a large Chinese company responsible for a major high-tech industrial zone just minutes away from the eco-city - while the Singapore consortium is led by Keppel Group.
Interviewed at his office here at Keppel Bay Tower during a recent visit home, Mr Goh was looking a little under the weather - which he attributed to the change from Tianjin's sub-zero temperature to tropical Singapore.
Yet this did not stop his mind from going in all directions - his train of thought is like a web rather than a straight line. His words tumble out spontaneously in an effort to keep up with his thoughts.
An economist by training, he appears to thrive on complicated, long-haul projects, despite the personal sacrifices that come with them.
Prior to the eco-city, he had spent six years of his life preparing for the 2006 IMF-World Bank meetings.
He spearheaded Singapore's bid to host the event for the first time, and as chairman of the organising committee, marshalled thousands of public service officers to host finance ministers and central bank governors from more than 180 countries.
For him, the global event was a 'platform to give a lasting impression that everything you want to do in Singapore, you can get done, which means we really had to create the atmosphere for it'.
This was why he personally pushed very hard for the 'Four Million Smiles' campaign to encourage Singaporeans to smile when greeting visitors attending the IMF and World Bank meetings.
Otherwise, the meeting would just 'be (something) very exclusive for a small group of people. How would the rest of Singapore be involved?', he had wondered.
For F1's first-ever night race last September, he had much less time to get the Team Singapore engine firing - just 16 months.
To transform the streets of Marina Bay into a floodlit, racing-car circuit ready for the world's television cameras, his team worked closely with the private sector and planned for all sorts of contingencies.
He was all prepared for a wet-weather F1 because 'the week before we were doing our final touches, it was raining cats and dogs'. Fortunately, the weather stayed clear during the race.
Though building a northern Chinese township from scratch would seem a world away from the bright lights of his earlier projects, he jokes that all three had one common 'curse': bad weather.
'For the IMF-World Bank meetings, it wasn't the demonstrators that caused me the biggest headache, it was the rain,' he quips.
Mr Goh does have one natural advantage going into a project with China: He comes from a Chinese-speaking family, speaks Hokkien, Cantonese and Teochew, and aced Chinese in school.
He also had ample experience dealing with China when he was with the Finance Ministry seven years ago, and then later at both MAS and MTI.
Closing the gap with China
While language and cultural familiarity count for a lot with the Chinese, 'beyond language, you know, it really is the personal effort to try to connect, it's the same whether you are in China or India or Singapore', he says.
Mr Goh had no hand in the development of south-eastern China's Suzhou Industrial Park. China and Singapore's first bilateral project, launched in 1994, was riddled with misunderstanding during its early years.
Among them: Chinese officials reportedly found their Singaporean counterparts arrogant in insisting on doing things the way they were done in Singapore, while the Singapore side found that promises made by the central government did not translate into action by city officials.
Both sides eventually learnt from the experience and Suzhou is now a textbook example of a business-friendly industrial park management in China.
When Mr Goh arrived in Tianjin, he found that 'the Chinese knew so much about Suzhou, they had studied it so much that the first thing I did when I came back to Singapore was to ask MTI for the Suzhou file, to try to catch up'.
Chinese officials, he believes, have come a long way in terms of management know-how. In particular, younger Chinese leaders, many of whom trained in the West, have closed the gap with their Singapore counterparts.
All levels of Chinese government have put their stamp of approval on the Tianjin eco-city project. Premier Wen Jiabao signed the framework agreement to develop the city in November 2007 and officiated at the ground-breaking ceremony last September.
The Tianjin municipal government recently pledged to invest $3.6 billion in eco-city infrastructure over the next three years.
The Chinese side has projected the total cost of the project over its 15 years of development at around $10 billion.
Mr Goh's approach in dealing with his Chinese colleagues in the joint-venture company is simple: 'We're there to build this new city together; there's no sense of whether this is a Singapore export or Singapore-managed'.
On a personal note, missing out on milestones in his children's lives because of his pressure-cooker job has proven tougher than dealing with cultural differences.
'The three-year-old - one fine day, I saw him walking and I asked my wife, 'How did he walk?''
As for his older son who has just started primary school, 'I don't even remember when he started to talk', he says ruefully, crediting his wife for holding the fort at home.
Supportive family aside, what has kept him going is the memory of his humble beginnings: his father was an odd-job labourer and he was the only one of six children who was English-educated.
As a boy, Mr Goh knew he had to work harder than his peers to get anywhere in life - which he did, winning a government scholarship to study at the London School of Economics and bagging a first-class honours degree in econometrics.
Sitting on the 18th floor of Keppel Bay Tower with a spectacular view of the luxury waterfront district below, he muses: 'It's already a very satisfying journey to come here from where I started out, from the days of not even knowing my ABCs when I started primary school.'
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