Ms Ellen Lee Member of Parliament for Sembawang GRC
Mr Ng Lang CEO, URA
Distinguished guests
Ladies and gentlemen
Good afternoon and thank you for having me here at the exhibition launch and presentation ceremony for ‘PubliCity: Your Ideas for Public Spaces’ and the Challenge for the Urban and Built Environment (CUBE) competitions. I am pleased to join you in this celebration of great ideas for public spaces, and I am very excited by all the high quality and refreshing proposals that have poured in.
Last November, URA announced the launch of PubliCity as part of the Draft Master Plan 2013. PubliCity stands for “Public Spaces in the City”. It is an initiative to raise awareness of the importance of good public spaces, and more importantly, to involve the community in enlivening public spaces through good design and programming.
In Singapore, we live in a fast-paced society where public spaces can be taken for granted. We may have passed by the same stretch of roads, parks or pedestrian walkways many times and never once paused to appreciate the flowers.
However, every liveable city needs well-designed public spaces. These spaces provide accessible, inclusive and common areas where the community can come together as friends or neighbours. It’s where people can relax and interact, get to know each other and build relationships. Well-designed public spaces raise the quality of life, anchor people to places and promote a common sense of belonging.
To achieve these objectives, public spaces need to be carefully planned and evenly distributed across Singapore. Through the PubliCity initiative, we hope to create delightful new public spaces as well as rejuvenate existing ones, to raise our quality of living.
Making Singapore’s city area people-friendly is an important part of URA’s plans. Take for instance the recently concluded i Light Marina Bay. With its fun light art installations and diverse fringe programmes, the i Light festival saw some 685,000 visitors coming to the Bay. Grandparents, toddlers, students, photographers…everyone enjoyed themselves, and I believe uploaded many “selfies”.
Besides programming, good seating at our public spaces is also important. I am sure many of you would have noticed the quirky benches installed around the city. These were made using the wooden planks from the former National Stadium as part of URA’s bench design competition last year. At Marina Bay, URA has installed some well-designed deck chairs along the promenade, and I hear they are rarely unoccupied.
We remain on the lookout for opportunities to promote walkable and active streets within the city. URA’s experimentation in Club Street and Haji Lane to go car-free during certain periods has been very successful and I am pleased that it has encouraged more local communities to initiate similar proposals to reclaim the streets for human activity.
As users of public spaces, you are in the best position to share with URA what you want to see in the various spaces in Singapore, how you want to use them and ways to possibly refresh them. ‘PubliCity: Your Ideas for Public Spaces’ competition was hence launched in November last year as part of the PubliCity initiative.
Many of you contributed suggestions on how to use and design the public spaces at four sites – namely, The Lawn @ Marina Bay; spaces along the Singapore River Promenade; the open space at Sultan Gate in Kampong Glam; and the Woodlands Civic Plaza. A total of 160 submissions were received when the competition closed in mid February this year. The response is very encouraging and I understand all of the proposals were well thought through and high in quality.
In fact, the ideas generated were so good that URA has decided to award eleven winners. These ideas will serve as inspiration and catalysts for public spaces projects. One proposal was for a giant swing to be installed at The Lawn @ Marina Bay; another proposed a gorgeous garden fit for Malay royalty in the middle of Kampong Glam. URA’s planners will study these ideas in greater detail. Where possible, we will see if some of the ideas can be implemented, be it temporary and fun pop-up projects, or longer term installations or programmes in consultation with the community and local stakeholders.
I would also like to thank members of the jury panel who have been very generous in giving their time and expertise in assessing the submissions for this competition.
Apart from the PubliCity initiative, the URA has also taken efforts to engage youths in designing our city. Youths are the future leaders, planners and architects of Singapore. To this end, the URA organises the annual Challenge for the Urban & Built Environment workshop, or CUBE for short, to help our youths understand the importance of urban planning. Junior college and polytechnic students get to play planners for several days under the tutelage of real planners.
To complement the PubliCity initiative, the last CUBE workshop centred on public spaces as well. Youths were given the challenge of planning for a car-free and pedestrian-friendly precinct in the Kampong Bugis district. They were asked specifically to focus on the provision of public spaces and to provide for alternative methods of transportation.
12 schools participated in CUBE and the competition yielded some very interesting ideas. This year’s CUBE also received unprecedented support from the industry. For the first time, we had practising architects from various architecture firms join us as facilitators of the workshop, together with our student facilitators. The participants were given more opportunities to learn and thus a more enriching experience.
In conclusion, I would like to note that URA will roll out more initiatives under PubliCity in the coming months. To me, this is an important effort to build an inclusive and endearing home for Singaporeans. I encourage members of the public, as well as industry leaders and professionals, to work with the URA to proliferate our urban landscape with more vibrant public spaces.
Last but not least, my heartfelt congratulations to all the winners of the PubliCity and CUBE competitions. Thank you.