Science of Cities Symposium Sessions
Opening Address by
Ms Adele Tan
Acting Deputy Chief Executive Officer and Chief Planner
Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA)
Date: 5 October, Thursday
Time: 9.00am – 9.10am
Responsible for long-term land use planning for Singapore, she has been involved in a broad range of land use planning areas, ranging from planning for an aging population, to developing a master plan for our underground space. She also drove a range of important planning and policy workstreams in her 25 years of public service in URA, the Ministry of National Development, and the National Parks Board, ensuring that Singapore's land use plans effectively meet Singapore's diverse economic, social, and environmental needs, while also addressing its future challenges. With a background in civil engineering and operations research as well and public administration, Adele is well-versed in utilising a methodological and evidence-based approach in translating research to policy.
Panel 1: Science-Based Approach to Future Scenario Planning
With increasingly unpredictable dynamics of cities and their development trajectory, planning cities can be a challenge. A systems level science-based approach can help reduce uncertainty by identifying the key underlying drivers of the urban system and its emergent behaviours, grasp the co-evolution of different systems, and simulate plausible future scenarios. By combining scientific urban science concepts such as circular causality and complexity sciences with advanced computational modelling and data, emergent patterns and trends can be detected at various temporal and spatial scales, helping to plan for the future of cities.
Date: 5 October, Thursday
Time: 9.00am – 11.00am
View Session Details
Panel 2: Science of Decarbonising Cities
The call for decarbonisation has intensified, requiring solutions to ease the phasing down of fossil fuels, develop clear funding frameworks and standards, and inform decarbonisation transitions within and beyond cities’ consumption value chains, before 2050. Science can help address decarbonisation gaps in the built environment, such as by innovating low-carbon designs and practices, developing decarbonisation accounting tools, synergising strategies, and optimising trade-offs. These can devise city-specific pathways to accelerate the attainment of net-zero targets across their sectors and systems.
Date: 5 October, Thursday
Time: 11.30am – 1.30pm
View Session Details
Co-curated Panel: Regenerative Cities
Curated by Singapore-ETH Centre (SEC) Future Cities Laboratory (FCL) Global
According to the recently released U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report on climate change, the world is likely to pass a dangerous temperature threshold within the next 10 years, pushing the planet past the point of catastrophic warming — unless nations drastically transform their economies and immediately transition away from fossil fuels. Estimates suggest that cities are responsible for 75% of global CO2 emissions, with transport and buildings being among the largest contributors. This is an urgent call for urban planners, policymakers, and researchers to take action and affect transformational change to shrink the urban environmental footprint, as the settlement footprints expand, the interconnections between them become even more complex. We require a sustainable and regenerative approach, creating a restorative relationship between cities and the context they are situated within. This session presents six such regenerative strategies.
Date: 5 October, Thursday
Time: 2.30pm – 4.30pm
View Session Details
For further enquiries, please contact us
here.