Singapore's World Cities Summit, which brings together government and industry leaders, is an indispensable platform for urban development.
Participants at the World City Summit exchanged views on different topics.
At the start of the 2021 summit, Indranee Rajah, Minister of the Prime Minister's Office and Second Minister of National Development and Finance, pointed out three current challenges – improving the resilience of urban infrastructure and systems to building a sustainable future for the vulnerable and the poor.
However, as the COVID-19 pandemic rages on, local governments spend a lot of money on epidemic prevention work and implement relevant relief measures, making it difficult to focus on these challenges.
"In view of the current situation, all localities have temporarily put aside long-term infrastructure development and prioritized responses to the problems caused by the epidemic. As the world recovers, we must make building infrastructure a top priority. According to the Global Infrastructure Outlook report published by the Group of Twenty (G20), the global infrastructure investment gap will widen to at least $15 trillion by 2040. We must move forward with determination. Infrastructure investment is a major driver of economic recovery and long-term sustainable growth, and these facilities are essential to meet the basic needs of society, including energy, water, waste disposal and transportation, all of which are indispensable to our cities and people."
Quoting World Bank estimates, Inlanie points out that to close the funding gap, 85 percent of the required investment must be borne by the private sector.
Under public-private partnerships, private investors working with governments to advance infrastructure projects can bring other benefits in addition to cost savings, such as injecting new ideas and fostering innovation, reducing the time it takes to complete projects.
Alfonso Garcia Mora, vice president of Asia Pacific at the International Finance Corporation, noted that the COVID-19 pandemic has made existing challenges worse. The company estimates that the average city's income has fallen by 15 to 25 percent, compounded by limited access to resources from the central government.
Therefore, what cities have to solve now is the problem of increased demand but reduced resources. With this in mind, the World Bank has developed a Green, Resilient, and Inclusive Development (GRID) framework.
"Municipalities must understand that they cannot solve the problem on their own, but need the involvement of the private sector. We need to create appropriate frameworks for size, capacity, incentives and budget priorities so that cities can borrow responsibly for the long term. We need to integrate cities into the GRID framework. One of the reasons is that the city's revenue has decreased significantly."
Garcia Mora noted that research shows that less than half of the world's major cities have climate change plans in place. This is particularly true in Asia, he said, which is the region most likely to be affected by climate change.
Dr. Yasuhiro Ishihara, deputy director of the Overseas Project of the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism of Japan, said that Japan has formulated the "Social 5.0" initiative on building smart cities, providing direction for future development.
Since 2019, Japan has worked with the ASEAN Smart City Network to co-nurture the concept. Through Smart JAMP, the Japan-ASEAN Partnership Smart City Development Support Program, the project has allocated a total of US$2.4 billion in financial assistance.
"It's an integrated, bottom-up platform that spans multiple sectors and is data-driven. Through the power of artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things, and big data, we can examine what we didn't see before, and through a variety of mobile solutions, we can reach places that we couldn't reach before."
Josef Hargrave, associate director and head of global foresight at Arup Foresight, believes that cities are complex systems and that people should stop looking at sustainability but start thinking about how to make them renewable.
"Many of the challenges we face focus on the transformation of complex systems that must be addressed by combining the forces of many components, players and domains. For now, our focus is on minimizing ecological loss and carbon emissions, but in the future we must go further and work to restore systems and achieve ecological gains, such as creating systems that consume more carbon than carbon emissions."
So, what will the cities of the future look like?
Lu Zhenhua, president and executive director of Keppel Corporation, proposed an interesting solution – floating cities.
"Keppel has the technology and capabilities to build floating cities that can both address land scarcity and the threat posed by rising sea levels to coastal areas. We are currently exploring how to build such an offshore development in Singapore, and the experience can be applied to other coastal cities such as Hong Kong, Manila and Mumbai in the future."
Building a floating city will be a feat for Keppel. Currently, the company's projects include a floating data center campus and a floating energy storage system.
Terence Chua, senior research analyst at Phillip Capital, noted that Keppel has delivered a number of smart city township projects, including China's Tianjin Eco-City. This case can also greatly help the company to develop its business in other countries and provide a reference for countries to learn from.