One key characteristic, and I think a positive one that Singapore has gained a reputation
for, is the way it's housed its people.
It's been a perennial issue.
How do you house this many people, five to seven million people and growing on an island
that would fit into Lake Geneva?
The government could have just said, let's not control it, let's have sprawl,
and then have more people living in houses.
But I think the strategy instead was to say, let's protect public space and green areas.
So what the government did was hold an international competition,
and the result of it was a housing development called the Pinnacle at Duckston Hill,
and it was won by a Singaporean firm, which we're all very proud of.
And it's amazing because on the same piece of land which houses 150,
your houses up to six or seven times the number of family units on the same size piece of land.
The top level, it's open to the public, because this is public housing after all,
and you can visit it on the 60th or so floor, you have a 360 panorama of Singapore.
Another example of interesting housing innovation is the interlace.
I think it's interesting for several reasons, because the developer obviously laid down
very stringent development guidelines, X number of units, X number of density,
and then sellable area, so the architects who were made had to deal with those issues.
And I think they were interested in breaking down the scale of the tower,
so instead of having these tall vertical towers, they broke them down to horizontal towers that are stacked.
These quadrangles form massive community courtyards, which are all themed differently.
Everybody has a chance to use them and look down into them,
but you're much closer to the ground than if you were in a vertical tower.
Another really interesting building is the repositioning of the mouth of the Singapore River
with a sort of a sluice gate to control the tidal water either coming in or leaving.
There's a building to house the mechanism.
And the building, instead of just being a utilitarian building,
I think there's a really fantastic agenda to also infuse it with a public and a park-like quality.
So the building houses a rooftop park, and on the weekends, on the evenings,
it's incredibly popular with families, and it's a beautiful site.
So for a building that houses just machines, it becomes this living space.
The government has been very clever to balance the need for density
with more ample public space that people can share collectively.
