Courtesy KCAP

As urban areas expand, the old central business district model becomes less, well, central. Many global cities are designing additional districts outside the city center as a means to attract emerging business and new residents. Madrid, for instance, hopes to entice companies leaving post-Brexit London to relocate to its Madrid New North project. Singapore, meanwhile, is planning a second central business district called the Jurong Lake District. An 890-acre mixed-use development located near the country’s newly consolidated container port operations, it is primed to capitalize on a future Kuala Lumpur–Singapore high-speed rail system. The district calls for 20,000 new homes and room for up to 100,000 jobs in a dense and sustainable, 24/7 area that includes a revived national garden park along the water. According to the website for Singapore’s Urban Redevelopment Authority, the project will “demonstrate how technology can enable a livable and sustainable urban environment,” using big data and sensors to create real-time feedback that will “enable facility managers to diagnose and fix problems in a timely way.”

Jurong Lake
Th Photographer Jurong Lake
Courtesy KCAP

Just don’t call it a “smart” city, at least not to its architects. “I don’t use that word actually, because I think it’s too inflated,” says Kees Christiaanse, founder and partner of KCAP, based in Rotterdam, Zurich, and Shanghai. Christiaanse, along with Arup, SAA, S333, and Lekker, helped plan the district with the redevelopment authority after winning the commission a few years ago. He prefers to think of the design, which was released to the public in 2017, as future-proofing the city. Future-proofing “means that you create a condition of public places and street patterns and building typologies that are resilient for change in the future and can accommodate unexpected events,” Christiaanse says.

One way to future-proof is to create flexible zoning. The Jurong Lake District is using a grid system—called “white zoning”—that is meant to give developers and businesses maximum leeway to change how a building functions as their needs evolve. Meanwhile, the infrastructure for subways, rail, roads, and other city services is “designed in such a way that it doesn’t interfere with the street pattern and the plots of the neighborhood,” Christiaanse says. Residential neighborhoods won’t be disrupted as infrastructure goes in, or in the future when it needs updating. The plan, for instance, puts the corridor and entrance for the future high-speed rail station along a park, so that city streets and residents won’t be disturbed when construction starts.

Courtesy KCAP
Courtesy KCAP

As Christiaanse notes, many smart city concepts call for a large common service tunnel underground, where infrastructure bundles are mounted and tracks are installed for delivery vehicles and waste disposal. But with accelerated tech development the way it is, “it makes no sense to dimension a common service tunnel on, say, a pneumatic waste conveyance system, because after 10 years, there is going to be another system,” he says. “Common service tunnels are huge and not flexible.” Instead, “we created a small common service tunnel where most of the pipes can be accommodated, and then we created a layer on the streets where you can embed things for flexible infrastructure.”

The design of the Jurong Lake District also differs from most central business districts in that it doesn’t strive for a variegated skyline punctuated by pinnacles and towers. In Singapore, the footprint of new buildings must be offset by an equal amount of green surface, and this has spurred the development of new building typologies, such as “shelf buildings”—groups of towers connected by an elevated shelf, like an oversized skybridge, that provides green space, jogging tracks, or even a pool. (The most notable example may be Moshe Safdie, FAIA’s Marina Bay Sands hotel, which opened in 2010 near the existing central business district and made an appearance in the 2018 film Crazy Rich Asians.) In the new district, the design team dictated that all the buildings be the exact maximum allowable height of 115 feet and include a flat green roof, in effect creating what Christiaanse calls “a floating garden.”

Other natural assets take a nod from Frederick Law Olmsted and his “emerald necklace” concept in Boston; here, a series of public spaces will be connected in a “Green Loop” of parks, bike paths, and greenways stitched throughout the district.

Courtesy KCAP
Courtesy KCAP
Courtesy KCAP

The redevelopment authority began the planning for the Jurong Lake District in 2008 around the existing metro system, but updated the plan when the high-speed rail became viable. “There is a little political turmoil between Malaysia and Singapore with the high-speed rail and the plans are getting delayed,” Christiaanse says. “That’s why our approach was to create a strategy of phasing in, where you do not create interdependencies too much,” he says. Construction hasn’t started yet on the district, but the redevelopment authority says that delays in the rail project won’t prevent it from proceeding. Which demonstrates how the development as a whole can keep moving forward, even if political bickering delays one aspect of it.

Turns out that a smart city, to be truly smart, needs to be based on thoughtful and strategic urban planning—an indispensable framework to accommodate the technology of the future.