Our APAC ‘liveable cities’ session took place at the Benoy studio in Singapore, where a panel of industry experts, led by Terence Seah, Benoy’s Head of Hong Kong, Singapore and Shenzhen, met to discuss the future of urban environments.
To kick off proceedings, Jacob Perkins, Head of Client Development at Handley House, asked participants to consider those elements that make Singapore a liveable city. Around the table, a number of key features were cited, from job opportunities and tax benefits to transport, amenities, education and safety. Features that provide, in the words of Chris Archibold, Country Head, Singapore, at JLL, “all the ingredients to make it a great place to live and bring up children”.
According to Terence Seah, the key contributing factor to Singapore’s appeal is access to greenspace. The ability to “have a relationship with nature” in an urban environment, said Seah, is unique in the APAC region. Other panellists agreed, with Pratima Washan, Asia ESG Practice Lead at AECOM, describing how noise, pollution and density in other Asian cities “defy the basic liveability aspect”. The main lesson from Singapore, said Washan, is the way the government assigns value to intangible assets such as green spaces, having adopted a “conscious policy over the last two decades” to promote civic wellbeing through access to nature. Green urban areas, said Washan, are crucial for both mental and physical health while delivering wider environmental co-benefits, but the majority of cities in Asia “don’t quantify the long-term benefits” of such assets which can help make a case for prioritising their development.
The trick, said Jacob Perkins, is to “monetise greenspace in a commercial sense”. There are ways, he said, “of measuring the impact [of such elements] on happiness; it might be slightly ambiguous in terms of the data we’re using, but we can utilise this information to encourage developers” to create greener cities. Picking up on this point, Karthik Karkal, Chief Strategy and Planning Officer at SM Prime, added that “investment in the public realm” is what “a liveable city does best”. According to Karkal, liveability is about experiencing a city through “parks and open spaces, eating alfresco, looking at a river”. Those cities that understand the importance of “public realm investment, its value creation, coupled with jobs and education”, are the cities that “tend to be really very liveable”. The danger, participants agreed, is leaving public realm development to market forces, which invariably ignore investments that don’t provide immediate returns.