Singapore 21st Century Solution to Smart Cities

Singapore 21st Century Solution to Smart Cities

Singapore has realized that they will face a problem in the near future as the urbanization will grow rapidly and continuously. There will be about 70% people of the world living in the cities in 2050. The effects to cities are clear, such as overcrowding, transportation congestion, and pollution. They have a sustainable and comprehensive analysis to handle this problem and try to make a great solution on handle this tremendous urbanization afterward. It's got to be a long term solution, and also strategically to face the keep growing city. They have to join the government and corporate partnership.

Long before this problem steps up, they have faced a vulnerability on their city sustainability because of the land and lack of natural resources problem. Singapore has been succeeded to implement the urban solution and they make it sustainable. For the example, they make a policy about holistic water management. They didn't subsidize water pricing, and diversified the water sources by the new technology, with combined the supplies from 55 percent recycled water and 25 percent desalination of sea water. They also have a target to make 80% of their buildings to be certified as a green building, and they are committed to improving their energy intensity to 35 percent in 2030.

Singapore has made itself as a living laboratory on their objective to throw the government and corporate together in a partnership. Singapore let the corporate to take a role in analyzing, developing, and make an innovative solution the urban infrastructure, so the government can make a summary of the data given from the corporate, which one is the best technologies and solution to be used. The corporate also have a benefit to market their products solutions. Another partnership between corporate and government also happen with IBM, as they provide the sensor networks for gather the data about consumer trends and behavior. They also make a snatch with EDF and Veolia from France to build the eco-towns, with Panasonic to maximize their energy usages such as solar energy, lithium ion batteries, home management energy, and more efficient energy of air conditioning.

That's not all. Singapore has done to establish more of increasing their sustainability. They also invest a huge scale of money to build and funding the Research and Development section for many sectors, which reaches 800 million SGD on 2011 until 2012. Tag along with the R&D, they also give a post graduates scholarship and specialized courses to find talented person to help with their research of urban solution, and also a national challenge program

The results from Singapore efforts is they have this big solution to fix the country, and they exporting the solution to the countries in the world for their urban infrastructure techniques and the eco-cities program. The examples are Tianjin Eco-City and Singbridge, which develop eco-cities in Asia. One of its landmarks is Guangzhou Knowledge City. Singapore also becomes a number one destination for the mayor around the world to learn about how to develop and implement sustainable solutions for their city.