May 30, 2024
Intro: A new book, Building Urban Resilience: Singapore's Policy Response to Covid-19 is one of the first few books to discuss the Covid-19 crisis as an urban phenomenon. Written by our guests—J.J. Woo who is a Senior Lecturer at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy and Debbie R. Loo, who is an architect by training with a background in professional practice, urban studies research, and teaching—the book takes a look at how pandemics have shaped urban planning for centuries, and how we can learn from the experience to improve our population centres in many different ways.
David Austin: Could you please tell us a bit what prompted you to write your recently published Building Urban Resilience: Singapore's Policy Response to Covid-19?
I'm interested in the backstory.
Debbie R. Loo: One of the reasons that prompted us to write this book was basically sitting at home under lockdown and realising that there was so much going on in the world out there that needed to be documented during this Covid lockdown that we were all having.
And we realised that there were several things that we were observing in our environment that was very peculiar and particular to this season we were in.
Woo Jun Jie: And for me, I think this thought of writing this book came about ironically after the lockdown and I was buying coffee, and I was in line, and I realised, oh, these stickers on the floor, telling me I should stand here a meter away from a guy in front of me.
And I realised that the way we're accessing our public spaces had changed fundamentally. Now I'm being told that I should walk this way. I should stand here to prevent myself from caching the virus or spreading to somebody else. And it occurred to me that when the pandemic is over all these things may well go away and we should take note and document how we responded, how the city responded to this pandemic.
David Austin: Very interesting and now that it's been a few years have passed, it's a good time to look back and see, reflect on all those different changes before they totally fade away from memory. But I'd like to ask you about this term resilience, because it's become quite a catchphrase lately.
You hear it everywhere, in the corporate world, in schools in policymaking. But as far as policy practitioners and academics, what do you mean by the term resilience?
Woo Jun Jie: Sure, I'll take a stab at this. Resilience, as you've mentioned, is a bit of a catchall right now. It encapsulates a lot of things and we, to understand resilience, we need to go back to its root word resilio, which is Latin for rebound.
So, our initial understanding of resilience is about how societies rebound from a shock, going back to this equilibrium point. This works very well for things like the economy, when we experience a financial crash, we want it to go back to the way it was before. But increasingly in public policy, we're understanding that notion of resilience as rebounding is not perfect.
When we rebound to the prior state, we reproduce some of the weaknesses that created a crisis. So increasingly we're thinking of two other aspects of resilience. One of them is persistence, resilience as a functional persistence. When we encounter, for instance, a pandemic, we want the society to keep functioning and the buses to keep running, the schools to be open. br>
So, there's that, not just rebounding, but persisting through the crisis. And ultimately, I think we are thinking of resilience as adaptation. We want to adapt to the fundamental causes of this crisis. And there's this author that I like to read a lot, Nassim Taleb. He talks about anti fragility. So, resilience increasingly is not about going back to the way things were, but it's about going forward to a new condition that can help us to grapple with the same crisis if it ever happens again.
Debbie R. Loo: And coming from an urbanist perspective we can actually borrow lots of understanding of resilience from ecological resilience. I think it's very apparent that some of the repairs and rebounds that we can witness in our environment is actually seen in urban environments like, the rainforest, plants, and even just animals how they adapt, how they are resilient to the environment around them changes. So, in a way this resilience really, when we borrow it from the ecological perspective, it is actually a capacity of an ecosystem to absorb repeated disturbances and even respond to these shocks as well as adapt to this new environment, basically aligning itself to another stable state. So that's basically how we hope that urban resilience can actually be this fundamental new state of strength.
David Austin: That's great and thank you so much for that context. I think that's so much more meaningful than the catchall term that gets bandied about a lot.
Let me ask JJ you can take this one first. Maybe you can give us a sense of the historic linkages between pandemics and urban planning.
Woo Jun Jie: For the longest time, urban planners have been figuring out how to make the cities more resilient to disease. And a good example is London, when you had the black death quite several hundred years ago.
And at that point, urban planners were realising that the disease was being spread through the water system, in the air. So many of our early urban planning efforts were focused on sewage systems. We had to find a way to clear waste from a city and flush it out of the city so that the disease doesn't spread. And the Romans had a similar experience with cholera, with all sorts of infectious diseases. So, the linkage between urban planning and disease has been very well established over the years.
Now with Covid, we had the additional challenge and that this is not a disease that's spread just by water, it's spread by air. So, we have to think about how to space people apart in the city and we are having to think about how to redesign our cities to deal with an airborne disease now.
David Austin: Okay, then let's dive into some of the discoveries you made in your research. Maybe you could tell us a little bit about what you found about Singapore's policy response to Covid-19.
For example, we could start with the social distancing and the lockdowns.
Debbie R. Loo: As was observed during this period during the Covid-19 pre lockdown, and post lockdown period we realised that the measurements of social distancing was actually calibrated based on emerging information.
So, I think that in various parts of the world, you get different kinds of measurements. Is it three feet or five feet? And in Singapore we had one meter, two meters. So, one of the urban examples we have is that social distancing in Singapore was actually calibrated very strictly by having actual measurements demarcated on the ground with tapes, barriers, even signages that tell you, you may start the queue here or even certain examples of doors and entrances and exits to malls and public areas being cordoned off and inaccessible. And this was part of the safe management measures that they were trying to control the volume of people entering and accessing certain buildings. So, these dynamic changes did really respond to emerging information about the viral spread and the nature of this pandemic.
So, the lockdown was also a response when they realised that there was actually too much transmission going on because of human movement and because of the airborne nature of the viral spread.
Woo Jun Jie: If I may add, we were really dealing with I would think two paradoxes when we were having to deal with the pandemic. First of all, we had for many years designed our cities for interaction. We wanted people to get together, to interact, to mingle, and now with the pandemic, we had to adjust our public spaces and to stop people from doing the things we wanted them to do.
So, we are no longer able to mingle, to interact, we have to find ways to space people out. And that means we had to, as Debbie has mentioned, put demarcations on the ground where you're supposed to stand, which corridor you're supposed to walk along, which direction you should be walking and even in a lift, which direction you're supposed to be facing when you're taking a lift.
So that was one fundamental paradox we had to overcome. Now, a second paradox is that the city and the urban spaces are fundamentally the static devices. They're built in concrete, steel, glass, but the disease is a dynamic phenomenon. We have to use a static tool to overcome a dynamic and ever evolving situation.
As Debbie has also mentioned, the disease changed. Our understanding of it changed, and as the disease evolves, we have to find ways to adapt the ways we navigate our city.
When we realised it was airborne, we had to spread people out a bit more. We had to get people to wear the masks. We had to put more sanitizing liquids in strategic locations where people would clean their hands especially when we realised that people were spreading the disease by contact.
So, I would think that for urban planners having to respond to that dynamism of a pandemic spread is something that is at topmost of our psyche right now.
David Austin: The fact that the information that informs the decisions is changing and being updated all the time, that must make it incredibly challenging.
But was there anything about the mechanism of getting that new information into the decision makers, onto their desk that we learned about or anything that we can take from that experience?
Woo Jun Jie: I think that having that deep connection between the public health professionals and the policy makers is very important.
As in our multi-ministry task force, we had the director of medical services who was part of the task force. So having a doctor, an infectious disease expert on the task force was important. It is also important to take note of what other countries are doing. And for Singapore, I think where we embarked on vaccination, we looked at some of the first movers.
What were these other countries doing? What were the challenges? And that allowed the policy makers to learn important policy lessons from these experiences.
David Austin: Now, I know another kind of subheading that you looked into was the urban infrastructure and capacity.
Woo Jun Jie: I think Debbie can speak a bit more about this as she's an architect by training and certainly features of our buildings had to be adjusted and were not necessarily amenable to dealing with a pandemic.
Debbie R. Loo: For urban infrastructure, I think one of the key takeaways that we had from this pandemic was that transport nodes, transit networks, these were very critical lines and pathways of spread. And it actually amplified the virulence of the pandemic. As we know global travel was really borderless before Covid, so to speak. And at any moment, any airport or major train station in any metropolitan area would be shooting off more than 10 trains to different parts of the city itself or even within the city or outside the city.
So, during this period of the pandemic, as real-time information was being disseminated to policy makers as well as medical professionals, people were still moving regardless of how fast any decision could be made, as well as the dissemination of certain measures and decisions in terms of practices in public spaces.
So, by the time anyone could really react you would be having hundreds and thousands of people moving as could be seen in China India, and even Singapore being a global hub.
This is one thing that I think we can't actually say we designed against this kind of pandemic because reality is that we still have to remain connected. And in fact, the world is trying to regain that connectedness post pandemic.
What we learn about how urban infrastructure permits the spread of pandemic is that we actually have to create greater awareness about safe management measures. How do we control flows of people? How do we even respond quickly to shutting down certain connections, certain cities? And also, how do we actually enable people to still get to amenities and their essential needs despite certain transit notes being disconnected. So, I think that is something that policy makers need to be able to respond dynamically and sensitively to.
David Austin: Another thing I wanted to talk about were some of the ground-up urban interventions that came about. Is that something that was really unique to Singapore or something that we saw around the world? And just tell us a bit about the kind of ground-up urban interventions that came about.
Woo Jun Jie: Sure, I can kick us off. With the pandemic, I think it was very natural that people came together in different ways to try to respond to the disease. And I think in Singapore, many of us were familiar with how there were people who started putting sanitizing liquids in the lift lobbies or even tying them inside the lifts on the railings and handles. And this was in response to the need to sanitize our hands. So rather than waiting for somebody authority to distribute these things or put them in the public spaces, and we saw residents who did this near the homes. We also saw some residents who came together and started making their own sanitized and liquids, distributing it to the neighbours.
I think these were all very helpful initiatives and certainly we see this happening in many cities across the world, and it's in a way, a response to a crisis. And rather than waiting for the government to come in, it's probably a little bit faster and quicker for residents to do it for themselves.
And I think the organisations who came together as well I think a good example was the food bank. They realised that there were some people who didn't have access to food, so they started going out and distributing food to households and people.
Debbie R. Loo: Yes. On that note, I think even on the local context, in Singapore we have seen that different residential committees (RCs) and different grassroots organisations had actually come together and put up certain barriers or even cordon tapes in their localised neighbourhood in an effort to actually help maintain the safe distancing measures that were in place in Singapore.
And I believe likewise, in other countries, we actually saw that even parks have certain demarcations, like I think it was New York City in Battery Park, there was a famous picture that we see a lot where there's a huge green and instead of, having people under lockdown, but they did have circular demarcations done almost like an art installation and they had them all spaced out and people were actually grouping and mingling within their own small groups or family units within these circles, but seen from afar.
They were actually very remarkable in terms of how beautiful even that a ground-up urban intervention in terms of trying to maintain safe distancing could be seen as an artistic installation.
David Austin: That's a great example. Now I think we've come to the really interesting part of your studies and your research is, what lessons and plans for the future can we make based on what you've learned about Singapore's response to Covid-19?
Woo Jun Jie: I think there are several policy lessons we've learned from Covid-19. First of all, when we face a pandemic, we need to worry about crowds. We have to find ways to disperse crowds. And now that means that we need to rethink how narrow our corridors are designed, how much floor area we're giving our malls, our critical facilities.
So, in other words, while cities have been known to be densely populated. We need to find ways to perhaps tail back on that densification to try to find ways to fit people in with less density. This may be very difficult in a place like Singapore where we have limited space.
Now, another lesson we've learned is that many of our urban facilities need to be designed in such a way that they're adaptable.
We remember that when we had some strains on our public healthcare facilities, we converted exhibition halls into makeshift hospitals. So, we do need to factor that into future designs of exhibition spaces. This could include having larger doorways where we could fit in hospital beds and equipment having access to water supply even high speed internet because you need to send x-ray readouts, and all kinds of medical data into these spaces.
So going forward while the Urban Redevelopment Authority, the URA has talked about some of these in their long-term plan. Thinking of designing grey spaces that can be adapted for other use particularly healthcare needs and healthcare users. And I think for the government from a policy perspective, the dynamic way that we responded to the pandemic is something we need to retain.
Having the manpower, mobilising the military to help with contact tracing, being creative in how we redeploy our resources and people in response to a pandemic that seemed to be evolving so rapidly. I think these are things that we want to retain a little bit of muscle memory for our policy makers.
David Austin: I'm really curious to hear Debbie's input because as you said, Singapore is already very short on space. And if you look at public areas like hallways at shopping malls in Singapore, they're already smaller than say you would see in Australia or the US.
So, Debbie, how are architects going to respond to this?
Debbie R. Loo: One of the emerging observations that we had during the pandemic was that residential homes during the lockdown were used in multiple ways, right?
Everyone, whether it was the parent to the child and even to the elderly, were not able to access spaces outside the home. And in fact, the home became veritably, a meeting room, conference room, school as well as even leisure and activity space. With all these requirements packed into a unit for the family, it was clearly impossible over a long period of time for people to coexist comfortably and actually to experience a sense of wellbeing.
So, one of these things that I believe we had picked up in Singapore and the URA was responding to some of these conditions was that we started to realise that we needed to have more outdoor spaces planned within estates that actually allowed people to go out of their homes and also to conduct whatever activities they needed to do beyond the confines of the home.
And how do architects respond to it? We're not actually seeing direct relationship between what happened to the pandemic and plannings per se, but it has informed how we conceive of leftover spaces in Singapore. Like now we are realising that transit pathways, like long corridors of train stations, could actually have all these potential to be developed into community spaces.
As we will see coming up, I believe in the East Coast area where the train station along Marine Parade that's upcoming has all these community spaces planned within. So as opposed to purely retail and food, we now realised that they are actually catering for elderly spaces, senior activity centres even playgrounds, play areas that are within a shelter area, but also in public zones.
And another thing that I realised started to be in the conversation was about how, we have work from home arrangements and all these coworking spaces that although they balloon during the time of the pandemic, unfortunately some of them have not survived post pandemic. Yet, at the same time, there is increasing demand due to new work from home measures and new regulations. That people might actually need more of these spaces again.
So, I think that one of the things that we need to plan for within, not just the residential features of the home or even within the estates, but even to transit oriented developments (TODs), where we have the confluence of retail, commercial spaces, residents, and we can cater more spaces for the people to use for all these multiple activities. So, this is the adaptability that we need to plan for and design for moving forward.
David Austin: Okay. Very good. I think that you touched a bit on my next question already on whether this case study has broader implications for urban planning outside of pandemics, and clearly it does. But is there anything else that you would like to add to that, JJ or Debbie, about, how this can apply to things beyond just pandemics going forward?
Woo Jun Jie: I think many of the protocols that we put in place have implications for the way we respond to other kinds of crisis as well. Whether it is trying to manage mass movement of people during a natural disaster or some kind of a disruption to, to public services. And certainly, the disruptions are another thing that we have been thinking about because, during the pandemic, we were able to keep public services functioning flowing efficiently to citizens.
So, in any other kinds of disruption, we need to rethink how we can continue providing public services. And another thing that we learned from the pandemic beyond the urban spaces, is that we had to diversify our supply chain, find ways to get food to people, medicines to people.
And these are things that I think will be highly applicable to any other kind of crisis that we will face going forward.
David Austin: Now, what about urban spaces and urban planning in general? What are the challenges that are unique to urban settings that people have to plan for that maybe might not be totally obvious to the lay person?
Debbie R. Loo: The challenges that are unique to the urban setting when JJ mentioned that urban centres are actually designed for people to come together, to be within community and to have trade, to have interactions and basically for culture to flourish, right?
So, a lot of these conditions that really are premised upon people coming together is particularly concentrated in city centres, particularly in Singapore. It's very dense and a lot of our activity is centred around the CBD, the central business district, as well as different residential nodes around the island are also heavily concentrated with different essential services.
So in fact during this period of the pandemic and the lockdown, we realised that even when the CBD was not functioning as it was meant to be because work was dispersed throughout the island, we realised that even within the residential centres, people were still gathering, there was still high incidences of transmission within particular areas like, some of the older mature housing estates where there were higher incidences of elderly people who congregated as they had to for their own social wellbeing. But unfortunately, were unintentionally causing, cluster of Covid.
So, I think one of these urban challenges we have is to realise that unfortunately we can't prevent everything due to the very nature that the city is urban, and people do gather in a very small area.
And the density, while it helps. It is also one of the ways that it became a point of transmission.
Woo Jun Jie: And if I can take one step back one of the unique challenges to the urban setting is that in fact, the way that we design our urban spaces, as in urban planning, we rely on a master plan and that plots out 10 to 15 years ahead of time, how we are going to redesign or design an urban setting? Now, imagine that you are facing a crisis. You need to adapt and adjust your plans, your urban designs. It's like trying to steer a very big ship. It can move it very slowly. So, we are slowly steering the ship as we speak, rethinking how our cities should be designed for pandemics.
But there are many other crises that we will face at some point or other. So, for the urban setting, change happens a little bit more slowly than other settings such as healthcare, security, if you face a pandemic in the public healthcare system, the first thing you do is to try to get more doctors, more nurses who come together, you write new protocol.
But for the urban setting, we're talking about a city built in steel glass and concrete. So, making adjustments to our spaces takes a little bit of time and effort, and it requires citizens to readjust the daily routines. So, this, I would think is unique to the urban setting.
Debbie R. Loo: Yeah. If I may add one more point in terms of the rigidity of the urban settings, so to speak. As we look at existing buildings, it is actually critical to rethink dynamically how we plan in zones. So maybe as we look at zones in the horizontal manner, which is planning parameters. Whether one area, one land area is used for residential commercial, it is also important to then plan vertically as well.
Which we are doing right now with a lot more TODs, transit oriented developments. We are planning vertically, so within a single plot you can have multiple users and actually this can even be broken into a smaller portion, which is when we look at certain floor areas, the floor plate it can become more adaptable. So, while we may decide that, say a certain few floors of a building at this point is actually for commercial purpose, but during the time of crisis, and if there is. excess capacity within that structure, that building, can we quickly pivot and use it for other means? Can it be a temporary healthcare setting?
We can quickly move certain medical equipment devices, but essentially it is to rethink how we decide the users of a building and whether we can actually create that dynamic change within a short span of time. I think this is something that perhaps the authorities are thinking of already, but I think it's also for architects.
We have to actually think ahead of time as we plan and design buildings.
David Austin: So that adaptability is really important to think about. Based on that I’d like to ask both of you now, looking ahead, what's your estimation of the next global pandemic. Do you think that there is enough muscle memory as you put it, JJ or that you know these lessons will make Singapore better prepared and maybe can respond even faster when there is the next pandemic?
Because I don't think it's, "if" it's probably "when," right?
Woo Jun Jie: You're absolutely right. David and I come at this with a more optimistic perspective. I think we've learned a lot from this pandemic, and this is a process that is ongoing. Now, remember that before Covid-19, we were already learning lessons from the SARS pandemic that had happened in 2003.
Now we talk about Singapore's National Centre for Infectious Diseases, but a few of us remember that it was only completed in 2019. We had built a hospital because of our lessons from SARS, so I have no doubt the lessons of Covid-19 being a much more severe crisis will stick a little bit longer.
It has been encapsulated into policy. So, the URA has its own planning directives and how we should plan the city better for pandemic. It has been embedded within, I think, the psyche of the population. Many of us still think back to those times and we remember things like safe distancing practicing public hygiene.
And I think I'm quite happy to see that even now when you take the MRT to work, people putting on a mask and we are now aware that if we are not well, we should put on a mask and whether it is Covid or the common flu, we don't want these nasty bugs going around each other. So, I'm quite confident that we have picked up lessons and maybe not all the lessons, but going forward, the city or Singapore in particular, will likely be more resilient.
We will be able to implement policies, build spaces with the memory of Covid in mind.
Debbie R. Loo: I second JJ, I am positive that this has been a very good learning experience for Singapore as well as the world. I think we took a lot of things for granted. Certainly, SARS was quite contained within Asia and Covid actually turned this whole global order upside down where we thought we could rely very confidently on supply chains very confidently on the city to run as per usual, that transport was going to get us wherever we wanted and suddenly we were not able to.
But that is actually proof of the resilience of the human spirit. We actually managed to survive. Communities were able to turn around and look inwards, so to speak, to help their closest; the neighbours, the people around them immediately.
I think a lot of the idea of resilience we think of it in terms of the concrete, the steel, how do we change structures, how do we look at larger entities? But actually the resilience comes from the human person. How do we respond? How do we absorb the new information and how do we choose to act differently given what we know?
And it is really people that make up the city. And in that sense, I would feel that, and I hope so that the smaller unit of the family and community can actually help in increasing the resilience and actually be able to adapt faster than actually how larger entities and organisations usually take to make decisions.
David Austin: That's a really good insight. Thanks for sharing that. In fact, that would make a really good ending to the podcast, but I don't want to end it quite yet because I just want to ask one more question and that is, do any of these lessons translate to other risks to urban centres? For example, like the higher temperatures that we've been seeing lately, or, the rising sea levels, air pollution.
Woo Jun Jie: I think our cities face a lot of challenges. The urban Heat Island effect is one particular challenge that we've been trying to grapple with. Lessons from the pandemic may help I think, with managing some of our issues with pollution.
During the pandemic, there were cities who were thinking about how to increase airflow, whether by enhancing wind corridors in the city to reduce heat to dissipate air pollution. So, these airflows have been found to help with infection as well. I think there was a study on, I think it was Hong Kong where they found parts of the city that had better airflow had lower rates of infections or lower instances of infection clusters emerging. The other thing about the pandemic is we learned how to move people effectively through the city. So, dealing with mass hysteria, if there was ever a crisis of that sort or any kind of security crisis, getting people to move in and out of the city will be helpful.
David Austin: Thank you both for joining us. This was really interesting discussion.
Woo Jun Jie: But thank you for having us on the show.
It's been fun for me as well.
Debbie R. Loo: Yes. Thanks David. Thanks for having us on the show and thanks for giving us this chance to share about our book.