Development
The future is underground
When population keeps growing and there’s little land left to use what does one do? By Seah Chiang Nee
Mar 1, 2008

PRESSED by circumstances, the 21st Century Singaporean is spending more and more time underground – working, driving, eating and shopping – and the trend is for more of it.

For years the government had been burrowing deep into the bowels of Singapore to squeeze out more use of its limited land area.

From a simple car-parking idea long ago, the subterranean concept has rapidly expanded in scope to reach almost every aspect of life.

The convenience has become an urgent solution to over-crowdedness that is expected to worsen by the proposed future population of 5.5 million people.

Today, almost every building in Singapore – from department stores to hospitals, and from military installations to churches – has one or two basement levels.

(The Gothic-style chapel of Singapore’s 141-year-old Convent has been preserved but modernised with a new underground courtyard.)

Singapore has just built South-East Asia’s longest underground tunnel to alleviate traffic jams. The 18km road – with the tunnel forming half of it – links two other expressways expanding Singapore’s network of underground transport systems.

The next will be the construction of a multi-billion-dollar MRT line (one of two new ones) that will run a circular 33.3km underneath central Singapore.

When it opens after 2010, the new Central Circle Line will have 29 stations and connect with all the radial lines leading in and out of the city.

Spotlighting on the Central Line, a Discovery Channel programme reported: “If you take all the best bits from undergrounds around the world, discard everything that does not work and then throw millions of dollars into further design and construction, then you have the project that has every Singaporean drooling over their dim sum.

“The Singapore Circle Line ... one of the biggest and certainly best underground railways in the world. In this film we witness the realisation of this utopian vision under construction. The spectacle is addictively fascinating.”

Dhoby Ghaut also stands out as an underground engineering feat. The five-level subterranean station links three MRT lines and a shopping complex and the Istana Park and will cater to 20,000 people an hour at its peak.

Two other lines are already partially below ground – as well as some roads and highways in the city.

The problems faced by affluent Singapore, especially in public transport, are best described in the Discovery Channel report:

“With a permanent population of 4.5 million, and a further 10 million visitors a year, the streets daily swarm with people, the roads are choked with cars, buses and bicycles, and the trains are packed. Gridlock beckons.”

For more than 40 years, this fourth densest city in the world, has implemented a long-term creative effort to maximise land use. Planners regard land as a non-finite commodity.

With the acute shortage, land use is strictly apportioned. Just over 50% is used to build homes, schools and hospitals, almost 38% for industrial use, and 12% for parks.

The strategy began after independence by reclaiming land from the sea and building upward, packing millions of people into high-rise homes and offices.

Reclamation is, of course continuing. A S$7bil (RM16bil) project has just joined up seven outlying islands to be a chemical hub. By 2010, Singapore will grow to 730 sq km, 25% larger than before independence.

Cemeteries were cleared after 1965, when citizens, except Muslims, were asked to reclaim family members for cremation.

The five-year cemetery exhumation plan immediately freed land to build 12,000 centrally located, high-rise apartments.

Over the past two decades, the government has exhumed more than 36 cemeteries of different races and religions.

Today there are no burial grounds in Singapore for non-Muslims; the dead had long made way for the living.

And now, with increasing tempo, it has indulged in a much more expensive programme of building below ground.

Underground caverns have been created as bomb shelters and storage for ammunition.

Singapore is also building subterranean ring roads, a science lab, shopping complexes and a S$9bil (RM20.6bil) underground sewage system that will take 20 years to finish.

Creating a city underground is, of course, slow and very costly, but less intrusive; something that goes on almost without interruption through the years.

Several years ago Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew returned from Paris impressed with its central underground ring roads and called for an eventual adaptation in Singapore.

The result is a S$4.8bil (RM11bil) plan to build a network of ring roads below the central business district.

Other mega subterranean projects include:

* A large sewage system that comprises two highway-size tunnels criss-crossing the island 12 storeys below ground; stretching for 80km with a series of smaller link sewers running another 170km, the project will take 20 years to finish;

* Singapore’s first underground ammunition storage depots, leading to land savings equivalent to half a fair-sized New Town;

* An underground science complex, being planned near the National University of Singapore; and,

* Shifting the big oil-storage business, which takes up much land, to underground caverns.

“Underground space is an alternative for the future space development in Singapore,” an official said.

This could be created in the form of caverns, tunnels and deep basements, for commercial, transportation, industrial and institutional purposes, he added.

The Economist recently wrote of Singapore's future underground ambitions. “Then perhaps concert halls, sports stadiums – who knows? Such schemes are hugely costly, but Singapore has massive financial reserves for its size,” it commented.

“In creating enough space to continue its breakneck expansion, money will be no object.”

(This article was first published in The Star on Mar 1, 2008)