City Planning concepts in tropical Asia are almost all versions of the Town and Country Planning Acts of countries in the northern hemisphere introduced during the colonial period.The problems caused by rapid and intensive development in the post-colonial period are exacerbated by the lack of new conceptual frameworks for the Tropical City.

As populations expand and economies grow , there are exponential increases in the use of energy to ameliorate the heat, noise and dust in the city. Tropicalised design of individual buildings can only go part of the way to resolving what is basically a problem of urban planning, environmental design and energy management. Tropical cities are fundamentally dissimilar to city planning models in temperate climates in that the reduction of the need to travel or to move about is predicated by the discomfort experienced in the hot humid conditions. Cities should be compact since suburban sprawl generates reliance on private motor vehicles and greater fuel use. This means more CO2 which in turn contributes to the green house effect. Reducing the need to travel is a basic strategy in the planning of the Tropical City. This is an issue which has tremendous implications on the form and structure of the city. Can the

Tropical City be designed as a compact living and working the environment is shady and well ventilated? Where the interior spaces between buildings are shaded with covered open spaces having cool micro-climates which serve as informal gathering places? Can new environment to reduce movement? Where distances can be covered on foot and technologies be applied tapping solar energy which is brought into these spaces to cool and to ventilate them? Can the roofs of large covered outdoor spaces be used to collect rainwater? Perhaps reduce the humidity? Can the city use the sun and the rain as positive and poetic elements in design? Can the city be considered as one complex eco-system and be designed as such? These questions challenge the imagination and stimulate the opening of new conceptual windows and vistas towards Asia's future. A strategy is essential for energy optimisation and ecological balance.

The Tropical City concept serves a process of mental emancipation from the conceptual biases which have governed the design of cities since the colonial period. There has been no basic re-think; new conceptual ideas and design tools have not been developed. This can be seen in the planning of housing estates. Most housing estates are designed with the living areas of the apartments facing out onto noisy roads instead of being turned around to front into quiet and cool interior landscaped courtyards or parks. Presently, the interiors of housing estates by the public and the private sectors are largely occupied by carparks instead. In Tropical planning, carparks are better on the fringes adjacent to the roads and highways, screened and shaded by dense planting allowing the interior to be
uninterrupted by vehicular traffic.

Through co-ordinated spatial design, noise, heat and dust pollution can be reduced. This principle of planning can apply to the design of the CBD too. Basic ideas such as this can only be implemented through overall town planning with appropriately modified planning and building regulations. So long as this is not the case, individual buildings cannot fully and properly respond to the challenge of designing for the tropics and air-conditioning is frequently the only way to avoid the noise, dust and heat generated by roads and hard surface areas that surround buildings. 50 per cent of energy used in some developing countries is for air-conditioning. If roads and carparks are planned on the perimeter and buildings arranged to front onto interior green spaces, such buildings will not need to be as dependent on air-conditioning as now but can be more loose-edged and exploit natural ventilation more. The savings in energy from this can be significant. Urban design and architecture in the dense city centres of the tropics should aim at reducing the temperature of the city as a whole and to make the reliance on air conditioning optional rather than mandatory.

The first strategy in such redevelopment, is to introduce high level shading to prevent the heating up of the city fabric. These high level shading devices would simultaneously be rain and sun energy collectors. The second strategy is to green the city both horizontally and vertically to absorb radiant and ambient insolation. This requires legal enactment: a green and a blue tax. The green tax is based on the fact that every building is deemed to have removed biomass from nature which existed prior to urbanisation. To the extent that a building owner reintroduces it back to a site, the tax is reduced. No tax is payable if the entire biomass is put back. The blue tax works in a similar manner. Every building has to retain rainwater so as not to waste this vital resource. To the extent that water is retained the tax is reduced. If all is discharged, the full tax is payable.

The Intelligent City

While we ponder the Tropical City, we must also think about making it more intelligent. The ambient information content has to be increased. Cities came about because of the need to transact ideas, goods and services. Therefore the natural emphasis is on communications of ideas. Increasingly, the transactions are speeded up through the use of telecommunications and information technology. We can expect such networks to be further intensified with additional features which will enable remote working, shopping and even automated manufacturing. A degree of decentralisation of the workplace will be possible and this will depend on provisions made for the social and cultural aspects of work and recreation which a more information-intensive system will imply the need for.

The demand for intensive human face-to-face interaction will correspondingly increase as economics develop. Face to face communication has advantages over electronic communication systems in that it is unpredictable and unplanned. Its importance lies in the stimulation of ideas and initiatives. In research areas such as MIT's "most intelligent triangle" in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the restaurants and watering holes are the important meeting places where researchers meet after work and exchange ideas.

This spatial pattern has important implications for the planning of cities of the future where the location of social nodes should provide scope for a wide range of human transactions which enhances the city as a multi-transactional, information and ideas centre. The combination of Electronic Information Systems and intensive human interface creates an enhanced role for the city. The city can be a campus wherein lifelong learning is entirely feasible and the lines between work, study and research can become closely inter-related. The spatial implications challenge architecture and urban planning. Another aspect of the Intelligent Tropical City is its ability to transmit and carry cultural cues. One of the most powerful but subtle means by which culture is carried is through ambience. The design of the social nodes should ensure that the ambience created is conducive to the animation of social and cultural activities within such nodes. Ambience is produced through a subtle and complex mix of factors.

These factors include the mix of activities, the scale of activities, the quality of the activities, the appropriateness and the density of use, the visual scale and textures of the place. To achieve ambience would therefore require a much more sophisticated process of planning and design and implementation
than at present employed. More user participation and dialogue with and design by different designers and entrepreneur groups have to be allowed to create diversity, vitality and participation. the intelligence of an environment is its ambient data level. Visual and formal complexity of the lived-in environment contributes to the development of mathematical and spatial skills. Freedom of physical movement, tumbling and touch contribute to the wholesome development of an individual's confidence,
physical co-ordination and conceptual capacities.

The environment must therefore be designed to be rich in texture, be variegated and with space for stretching limbs and involving the senses. To stimulate the mind and the senses, the ambient data level in terms of activities and sensations should be high. Clean and sterile buildings and spaces separated from nature and from human activity should be avoided or ameliorated. This is the hidden agenda in environmental and architectural design urgently requiring attention. Existing environments can and must be enriched through modification. Focus on the Intelligent City arose simultaneously from several agendas which have converged in the last decade. The aspect of "intelligence" came from developments in the IT field. Concepts such as Knowledge Technology, Information Science, Teleworking, Interactive Television, Hyper-media, Artificial Intelligence and Expert Systems have spurred speculation, experimentation and research into human interfaces, the family and implications on leisure, learning, work and economic production. The Tropical Asian City concept juxtaposes information technology with economics, culture and geography in urban settings. It seeks to utilise positively the sun, rain, wind and vegetation to produce a conducive and efficient living environment imaginatively. A new life-style is obviously implied too. A poetic agenda naturally arises too to create forms and expression which embody the unique and the intrinsic.

Testing the concept in Singapore: The Kampong Bugis Project
The Tropical City Concept was tested in 1990 by a team led by Tay Kheng Soon. It was occasioned by the appointment of private architects to undertake urban planning studies of specific areas of Singapore. Tay Kheng Soon's theory of urbanisation, in the context of existing cities in the tropics, emphasises re-urbanisation. This is within a larger thesis that the city's relationship with the countryside is to be considered as one, and not two realms, for the sustainability of both. The conservation of bio-diversity and nature which surrounds cities is best achieved by limiting human encroachment into nature and eco-agriculture. The priority is to limit the existing curtilege of the city by better utilisation of existing urban land, through better planning and compact spatial morphologies.

Kampong Bugis is a 72 hectare site of cleared land at the confluence of two rivers on the fringe of the Singapore City centre. In contextualising the design parameters of the site, all the available urban land in the central planning area was quantified. Next, the pattern of floor space generated over the years was analysed from statistics. From this, it was possible to quantify the residential and non-residential floor space pattern of demand. It was then a simple matter to compute the total floor area in relation to a projected population. The next task was to compute the average plot ratio on the available land to be developed for the projected population. It was found to be 1: 4.5 when the total floor area was divided by the available land in the central region. The disused railway yards, oil-storage tank farms, disused gas or abandoned engineering works, etc., when added together, could easily accommodate an extra million people without encroaching upon the countryside.

The proposed plot-ratio of 1: 4.5 was not high by metropolitan standards. It was therefore judged to be entirely realistic. A number of other conclusions could be drawn. Firstly, it is feasible to increase the city centre population greatly without undue stress. Secondly, with the possibility of housing a large population in the city centre the need for the outward expansion of new towns which were typical lybuilt at a net residential density of only 2.8 in Singapore could be halted and thereby the outer natural fringes of Singapore island could be preserved for nature and for future generations. Thirdly, the compactness of the nodal clusters allows for the interconnection of buildings at basement level and at podium level. The need to travel could be reduced through the mixing of residences with work place, shopping, entertainment and social and cultural facilities. Through heavy planting on roof decks and on the building surfaces, a conducive micro-climate could be created. The shielding of the interiors of building sites from the dust and noise of roads enhanced by interconnecting carparking decks below the buildings basically creates a quiet and dust-free environment. The optional use of air-conditioning for comfort in the tropics becomes possible rather than being obligatory.

It was reasoned that air-conditioning is a permanent feature of a more affluent way of life in the tropics. But a strategy was evolved to enhance options for its use and to introduce energy-saving technologies. The principal technology is a decentralised energy production policy. In this policy, the waste heat which would have to be otherwise discharged can be recovered for district-cooling through heat absorption refrigeration.

Furthermore, the transmission losses of remote power generation would also be saved. The feasibility depends entirely on the compactness of the urban morphology. The tropical city concept was tested in the context of an island-city-state. When the thinking is applied to a larger context, other factors come into play. Factors such as rural to urban migration, ecological protection of landscapes and natural features, water and soil conservation, and preservation of bio-diversity, all have to be factored into the concept. The Kampong Bugis Project interprets the conceptual idea and agenda for the Tropical City into a strategy awaiting implementation. Singapore is well placed to address this agenda, perhaps better than most cities ,since many of the others are beset with congestion exacerbated by social conflicts, endemic poverty and great disparity threatening to tear their social fabrics part. What is done in Singapore would give the city state a role in the tropical world which goes beyond rhetoric. When Singapore is developed as a tropical city, it will derive concepts, technologies and products which can be replicated and exported.

The Tropical Asian City

The Tropical City Concept is an attempt to reconceptualise the relationship between architecture and city planning at the metropolitan scale in a sustainable ecological manner. It is an attempt to forge the critical link between the ecology, city planning and architecture. The basic design challenge is to conceptualise a sustainable form of planning cities and designing buildings and to develop the requisite technology which does more with less. Sustainability as a principle means that the fulfilment of human needs at any moment in history is achieved in a manner which does not jeopardise the fulfilment of future needs. The Tropical City Concept is a design strategy which attempts to answer the questions of dense urban living in a geographical context but in a manner which acknowledges the sun and the rain as positive elements in design rather than as factors to be shunned. The design of the city cannot any longer be conceptually divided into closed categories such as "architecture" and "planning". Space in the city has to be conceived of as an integrated resource albeit under different responsibilities.

Kampong Bugis Design Team
Tay Kheng Soon , Robert Powell , Chua Beng Huat , Chung Meng Ker, Patrick Chia, Winston Yeh, Lai Chee Kien , Rob Hearne.

Summary of Planning Parameters of Kampong Bugis Demonstration Project

Total site area = 76.01 ha
Site area excluding water = 65.02 ha
Total buildable land = 46.80
Total built floor area (Residential + Non-residential) = 1,915,600 sq. m.
Total Non-residential built floor area (37%) = 703,000 sq.m.
Total residential built floor area (63%) = 1,212,600 sq.m.
Total number of dwelling units = 9,748 units*
Residential plot ratio = 2.59*
Non-residential plot ratio = 1.50*
Total plot ratio, including half of perimeter road (Residential +
Non-residential) = 2.59 + 1.50 = 4.09
Gross plot ratio = 4.80

* Based on average family size of 3.11 persons and residential floor space of 40 square metres per person.

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