Rubanisation

Tay Kheng Soon (TKS) is a practicing architect and adjunct professor at the National University of Singapore's School of Architecture. He was formerly president of the Singapore Institute of Architects and founding member and Chairman of SPUR, the Singapore Planning and Urban Research Group.

To this day, TKS continues to churn out creative, out-of-the-box ideas that he personally sees through to reality via his architectural practice, Akitek Tenggara, which he founded more than three decades ago (in 1976).

Monday, June 21, 2010

Steps in Implementing Rubanisation

Seldom will there be an empty piece of land to Rubanise. Most likely the land will be alongside a road with houses, shops and little factories strung along the road either tightly packed or spaced out.
Land ownership or other forms of entitlement, lease, right of use etc. have to be rationalised. A State level rationalisation of this has to take place.
The different tenures have to be integrated into the Ruban plan. This will result in a patchwork of situations. Priority is decided by democratic principle of majority interest; however minority rights have to also be catered for. Local referendum decides this. An overall land entitlement and right of use law has to be clearly resolved at the local level since it cannot be resolved at the remote national level. The principal of direct democracy on land use to guarantee the right of occupation has to be decided locally but backed by a National land code that sanctions it.
This is not an abstract issue. Successful examples of mutual benefits shared between land owners and land tenants has first to be demonstrated before there can be successful legislation at the National level. A suitable location has to be found.
A Ruban settlement is typically relatively self contained in a 1 km diameter settlement surrounded by vegetable and fruit farms with various crop plantations further away. Every Ruban settlement will be relatively energy autonomous using renewal energy technologies. Water, sewerage and waste recycling are essential components of the Ruban economy. The use of local building materials increases the recycling of capital within the Ruban economy thereby stimulating the evolution of local technology and entrepreneurship. ICT and road linkages allow for development of sustainable eco-regional economies at local levels eventually evolving into larger integrated regional economies.
Rubanisation is a reconceptualisation of the current Western Developmental Model and destructive lifestyle of over production and consumption.
Without a Rubanisation concept, the existing non-urban life in Asia is characterized by marginal existence in the form of ribbon settlements that can be found everywhere in Asia along roads leading out of the urban conurbations. These create road congestion and compound marginal living.
Usually then, the schools and health clinics are somewhat far way from most of the dwellings.
The houses and other buildings are usually made of wood and cement blocks with corrugated metal roofs. Drainage is usually poor and stagnant pools of polluted water can be seen everywhere.
Waste disposal is poor. Piles of rotting material and piles of polythene bags are everywhere.
Latrines are very dirty and smelly. Open defecation is common.
Goats, cows, dogs and chickens roam about.
Typically the houses are small, about 4m by 5m, with cement or earth floor.
One incandescent bulb or a dangling fluorescent light is usual if electricity is available. More often it is an oil lamp.
Wood smoke emanating from kitchen fires is common.
Small kitchen gardens, herbs, medicinal plants and luck plants can be seen. These grow in tin cans, in the gaps between footpaths and in make shift planters.
Further away, there are small farm plots of subsistence and cash crops.
Lorries, vans and motor cycles are parked in from of houses and along the roads and lanes causing congestion and exhaust gas pollution.

These are often the conditions that Rubanisation has to address. How to begin?

The Rubanisation of the entire district has to be drawn up and the macroeconomics determined before Rubanisation of any local area is presented to the residents. The logic of Rubanisation has first to be communicated to the residents of the selected first Ruban settlement to be started. Success of the first one is crucial to the overall success.

A Ruban Bank that acts in a low cost manner, serving as the facilitating agency, has to be set up with access to sources of low interest loans from Philanthropic Organisations, CSR sources and Investors who want to do good while sustaining their capital. Interest rates of 1% to 2% with additional rates of returns based on crop sharing arrangement with the Ruban Co-operatives are to be formed.

A full presentation involving the entire community will communicate the advantages, in terms of enhanced livelihood potentials, education for the kids and health facilities to be provided. The logic of the establishment of cooperatives as basis for the local economics has to be shown. A majority of residents must then agree and sign a public contract to form by election a local leadership council to facilitate all the processes in implementing the Rubanisation proposal. A development loan is arranged to facilitate the building of the basic infrastructure. The concept of this is incremental quality to start minimal and to improve as the economics allows in tandem with stages of progress.

All resident families have to be accounted for by census survey and establishment of register. Only registered families have priority for resettlement. This is to discourage freeloaders.
These are classified in terms of owner occupiers, status of tenure, length of occupation, demographics, occupation, estimated household expenditure, debt obligations, household goods etc.
From this data, a financial plan has to be drawn up for each resident.
A range of accommodation has to be devised to suit each resident family based on family data and resource capability.
The basic principle in the design of the Ruban settlement is spatial efficiency. This means that the dwellings have to be high-density low-rise, interconnected by small pedestrian service lanes but which can be used by bicycles, motor cycles and small service vehicles as well.
Children must be able to walk to school. The minimum size of the school should be for 500 kids ranging from preschool, primary and secondary. The type of school must not only teach the basics they must also develop community spirit and develop character.
The school should also be a health clinic and microcredit bank. Thus children, parents and teachers are at the heart of the life of the settlement which is based on the Work, Live, learn, Play and Farm principles of the new values embodied in the Rubanisation concept.

Intelligence:

The critical factor in sustainability of a society is its continued ability to generate and sustain its institutions and cultures of problem solving.
Traditions of problem solving versus traditions against problem solving have to be addressed.
The politics of knowledge will emerge from the dynamics of success of the Ruban Council. This is the prime institution that will have earned the prestige in instituting the culture of problem solving. Only then will it have clout to change negative ideas for positive ones. The internet is a prime instrument to be used in this effort.
The fostering of direct democracy is another primary institution building challenge of the Ruban Council. Through this politics and evolved culture, the quest for greater and greater synergy in the application of the networks of knowledge will grow.
This is still not enough. Knowledge born out of need satisfies current issues but not long term systemic issues. For this, research is necessary. This can only come from collective stimulation among a community of curiosity. This is both place-based but also globalised through the internet. A network University system will link all Ruban settlements.
Ruban settlements have also to form local knowledge networks also and integrate these into the Network University. Surpluses from the co-operative makes this possible. The economics of Rubanisation will be efficient in that wastage is eliminated through active local supervision and knowledgeable allocation tempered by the free market. The eco-regional market economy ensures accurate pricing and allocation.

Labels: ideology, policy

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Friday, June 11, 2010

Has the future of Singapore got anything to do with Rubanisation?

This is one question but it is embedded in a matrix of many others. Has Singapore got a future at all? Has Singapore got a future as an independent Island-city-state? What is the future of city states as such? What is the future of urbanisation? What is the meaning of “nation” in a connected world? Can present identities dominated by the nation expand to include others? Will a merging of regional identities be possible? What is the history of these questions; was the future of Venice predictable? Was it ever envisaged that Venice would end up as a mere tourist spot, a relic of its illustrious past? Was it a victim of history? Did its own internal faults contribute to its final failure? What about Singapore? Are there similar trajectories to be found in Singapore and in Venice? There is no need to go into all these just now. It is merely enough to mention these as an indication of the context of my inquiry.

But of course, nothing is ever exactly similar and the future is also partly made by the actions and ideas of today. Singapore’s neglects will strike back at it but its successes will soften the blows. No plans are devoid of unintended consequences. What is certain however is that Singapore, in its present form, is the product of local ambitions enabled by the cold war context. Thus, Singapore has become the illustrious child of Western global corporate finance and industry. In tapping the sources of funds and Western ambitions, Singapore shaped a life around the Western requirements. It was willing to sacrifice a life of its own to be the great outpost of the West in Asia; indeed, a bulwark against encroaching communism and the dangers of ethnic strife. And it played this role brilliantly right into the new age when old enemies have now become friends and cold-war-China is now a sort of bedfellow replete with US treasury bonds to bolster an export driven economy based on intense urbanisation, financialisation, industrialisation and urban consumerism.

But Singapore wants desperately to remain relevant to all and sundry. It will change at a measured pace as the tides change. Singapore goes with the flow to survive… and if new currents from without and from within change it too will change. As better education and youthful restlessness is fueled by globalism, pop culture and the internet, so Singapore will take its time to also change, but always within the elite model of governance structure it created. Since Singapore has choice in terms of available foreign talent, it does not need to hurry to build local talent. The new emerging internal energies are managed by letting off steam through a managed arts and culture program sponsored by the State.

Meanwhile, the old formulas by which power is maintained still work. The very well paid leadership in politics, civil service and academia guarantee that the system is maintained with the minimum of disruption. Renewal is ensured as smart young scholars are inducted into the ranks of the ruling class to perpetuate the system. Any personal disquiet is handled by these smart people who know how to balance the rich benefits and any troubling thoughts that emerge. This is the secret of the Singapore model as it moves into the troubled waters of the emerging new world.

Given the structural faults now visible caused by deregulation and free market radicalism, Wall Street greed has been revealed to the world as being responsible for the boom and bust financialisation of hyper urbanisation, huge over production and hyper-consumerism… the collective causes of the global environmental crisis signaled by climate change. So it is becoming clear that the crises are a crisis of the developmentalist growth paradigm. Does this crisis indicate a post-Wall Street world?

Will brakes on greed change the strategy of world domination by the corporations and banks? Will the allure of urbanism remain even in modified forms continue to beguile the masses? Will the rural and urban poor remain poor and degraded? Will not the spread of information heighten the sense of relative deprivation? Will Singapore stick out as a sore thumb in the sea of poverty all around it? Is there anything that can be done? This essay is therefore a projection, an attempt to address the questions of Singapore’s future that goes beyond its current conception. The tenses of this essay deliberately confuse past with present with future. There is a telescoping of all three.

I postulated a resolution to the rural/urban dichotomy since 2005, way before the current financial crisis and the Copenhagen Climate flop. Rubanisation is the name I gave the paradigm shift. There was no better term to describe the resolution of the dichotomy. Rubanisation is a proposition that offers viable choices as to where to work, live, learn, play and farm in the no-choice situation between megacities and muddy farms. It is either: continue to live in congested megacities, or suffer deprivation in rural and or urban grime. Many chose to live and hope in cities. This does not prove that mega-urbanisation is inevitable.

The Red-shirts in Bangkok signal that the rural poor, equipped with mobile phones and the internet, are not going to stand for the systemic marginalisation anymore. Is this the future? How will Singapore deal with a million climate refugees banging at its doors as farms fail? The Naxalite rebels in Eastern seaboard India seem to gain momentum against an economically resurgent urban India. Manmohan Singh said that domestic revolt is India’s number one problem. Is the Taliban rank and file under a veneer of ideology the same phenomenon? No doubt, the Red Shirts will inspire more collective actions by the poor. There are four billion others worldwide depending on how one defines “poor”. The urban middle classes, ensconced in salaried work and wage labour find relief only through shopping, TV and pop culture, and are slowly awakened to the way things are by the Red Shirts and their own disquiet. Singapore is one such cozy cocoon where disasters elsewhere only confirm the State’s reassuring presence. Singapore’s middle class grouse about small things, seeing the Red shirts as trouble makers even as their hearts bleed for the child prostitutes of Rio shown on BBC. They console themselves that there is a natural law that operates. In which the rich get richer and the poor get poorer and there is nothing to be done about it.

And so I postulate a different sort of world, coming strangely from a comfortable Singapore where I live. I see a Rubanised world coming about. Where the countryside and the city is considered as one space, not two. Where living in Ruban settlements in the folds of nature is not mud and grime but a high-tech life linked to nature and community. Where children can walk safely to good schools; where parents are involved in their children’s learning; where energy is from an assortment of renewal sources: wind, solar, algae-oil fired power generators, micro-hydro etc.; where aging is not loneliness but in company with like-minds; where work is self-fulfilling; where family and community thrive on individual and collective initiatives and information is integrated and global; where compassion is real and missions are sent to offer aid wherever it is needed. The internet links everyone with the world of ideas, entertainment and knowledge. The village is never the same anymore, nor is the city. The Ruban settlement is not the old village but has moved forward to a new-tech age. The city has lost its slums; the people having gone to a better life in the countryside. Some city dwellers find the stress of city-living nothing to compare with the new life they now enjoy in a Ruban settlement. Their links to the city they left behind are not lost. They visit and remain in contact with city friends and institutions. The internet and the robotic bus make this a real lifestyle choice.

This is Rubanisation. Food security is integrated with community bonding between the farmer and the consumer. The supermarket is a thing of the past. It represents now the tyranny of the corporate buyer who buys cheaper and is able to sell cheaper to middle class consumers but make a tidy profit by binding the producer to their shopping list of produce within the price margins they dictate. The Ruban farms are now self-financing, productive because of small machines. Cooperatives ensure fair trade. Farmers markets in the Ruban settlement ensures buying local. Local food processing industry adds value, creates new work, spurs innovation, and diversifies incomes. Robotic buses break down distances, resolves the rural/urban space dichotomy. Some urban workers continue to stay put by choice not compulsion. Drudge workers who had drifted, out of desperation, to the cities to earn money to send home to depleted homesteads can now return home to find new work in farms and/or in factories de-centralised so as to follow where labour has gone. Some robotic factories are owned by the cooperatives to earn surpluses to invest in knowledge and innovation. A new dynamic is established between small producers and big ones. Robotic factories owned by the relatively autonomous Ruban settlements even out global price wars and end monopolies. Moreover, organic quality products compete on the basis of new consciousness and quality.

Cities like Singapore become the sponsors and take on the role as one of the most aggressive Rubanisation banks evolved to finance the 21st century global revolution known as the Post-Urbanisation Era. The change started in South-East Asia and then to China and India because they had to stem the tide of revolt. Thus there is now a new flow away from insidious financial monopoly operations by greedy bankers, urbanists and their acolytes.

An Asian Monetary Fund which includes the European Union is finally formed and it stops the financial de-stabilisation strategy which emanated from Wall Street. It made currency destabilisation unprofitable. Asia no longer needed to buy USA treasury bonds, be subject to the manipulated financial cycles and Asia now enjoys a stabilisation of its own currencies and therefore its own economies. The true meaning of the term “Development”, began to signify “transformation” albeit to a more sustainable and satisfying state of affairs displacing “growth” as the logic of change. The frenetic culture of consumerism and hysterical aesthetics can come to an end finally.

Despite Prahalad’s assurance of “fortunes to be made at the bottom of pyramids”, the earning power of the poor had to be transformed and a new economy created in the process. This is the new dispensation coming in the form of a new nexus between poverty eradication, environmental sustainability and cultural justice. Rubanisation is the new idea that coalesced all the different ideas and initiatives incubated in the early 21st century upon the ashes of 20th century hubris. Surin Pitsuwan, Secretary-General of ASEAN in a private conversation posed the question of how to bring 400 million South-East Asians out of poverty. This is the 21st century question globally; poverty is the soft underbelly of the global middle class urban economy and Rubanisation is the answer because it offers higher efficiencies in deployment of labour and new satisfactions in living with nature. Already the Ministry of Disadvantaged Regions of Indonesia adopted (as of 7th December 2009) Rubanisation, renaming it “Rural Urbanisation”. My working papers were integrated into the position paper presented by the Minister in December. Meanwhile, I have had extensive discussions all over the region. Laos and Sri Lanka have shown great interest in the Rubanisation strategy. Hue of Vietnam has enthusiastically included Rubanisation as a component in their tourism master plan. The early Ruban settlements will enhance a new form of agro-tourism as the settlements will show a full range of eco-technologies integrated into traditional cultural practices embedded in farming communities. These projects will demonstrate the new direction.

The micro-credit movement pioneered by Yunus and Mechai prepared a new generation of rural managers and entrepreneurs for the coming new age of which Rubanisation is the key instrument. As Rubanisation gets going, there will be a new confidence among ”rubanites” as distinct from “urbanites” in their effort to consolidate the new grounds of autonomy against remnants of the old hegemonic forces. Capital and material flows between the old cities and the new Ruban settlements reflect the new dynamics and power relations as it evolves. The sort of indirect democracies induced by Rubanisation will move towards a federation of small aggregated direct-democracies as the Rubanised economies drive in a new direction in contrast with the centralising tendencies of the old industrial/financial economy and politics. This is an inevitable phase in the dynamics as Rubanisation takes root. However, with the adoption of multiple-option technologies driven by robotic production and decentralised production enhanced by Ruban decentralisation, but connected by high speed roads and rail infrastructure, the dispersal is possible and desirable. Bringing work closer to where people live makes economic sense if the cost of transportation is not expensive.

Places like Singapore will vie to gain advantage and influence among the other financial centres in Asia. Singapore has an advantage because paradoxically, the stifling atmosphere it created in its heyday as an outpost of Western Industrialism, Corporatism and Western Style pushed its creative citizens out into the region to find fertile grounds to realize their ideas. These can now return as the advisers and facilitators of the new financial paradigm that Rubanisation offers.

It works like this: the purchase of the land and houses of the poor rural settlers has to be financed through low-interest loans to the cooperatives or developers of the new Ruban settlements. When the infrastructure is ready, the original people and new ones can buy the new homes and farms which offer much better prospects for work, living, schooling for the kids, better health facilities and choice of occupations and these settlers get the chance to have another bite of the cherry by being able to form producer and seller cooperatives which earn better and save better to invest in new ventures and for the old to retire gracefully, working as they please and enjoying “slow food”: long lunches to make new business deals and concoct new cultural creations. The banks and developer/financiers get their returns from the real estate and business opportunities in the commercial areas of the Ruban settlement. A partnership for progress is naturally offered. No doubt, Rubanisation is longer-term investment that has built-in social, cultural and environmental benefits.

So what about the high-rise buildings that so characterise the Singapore model? Well, they are a relic of a past set of ideas. They result from the developmental ideas of the immediate post WW2 years when the “free” world was racing to develop against the challenge of the communist developmental paradigm. Singapore was the preeminent success model against that. It innovated authoritarian rule within the recognisable minimal condition of democracy; the vote. With this it organised the society around the industrial model, housing the people in high-rise flats, set up state organised social institutions, and mobilised the people, the schools and the culture to a mindset amicable to the industrialist model and values. Its space planning model was simplistic and it worked by sheer predominance. The planners did not understand or if they did, did not want to create an environment that allowed more individual lifestyle and option that low-rise high-density would provide. Singapore is run by very intelligent people at the top. The problem is that it has so succeeded that it now wishes for more creativity but finds little of it and so it imports foreign talent in its impatience with local feet dragging and small-mindedness.

What were and are the options of a different physical environment and what social and cultural space might these produce, induce? Some simple maths is necessary. Singapore has approximately 700,000,000 m2 of land surface. A population of say 5 million, each person requiring 50 m2 accounting for all categories of floor space usage, the total floor area required would be 250,000,000 m2, only approximately 1/3 of the island even having assumed 1-storey buildings. This reduces to 1/6 if all the buildings are 2-storeys and 1/12 if all averaged 4-storeys. This simple math illustrates the spatial possibility. Globally the situation is even starker. Anyone can do this simple math: assuming all human habitation at 35m2 each, 6.5 billion people will only occupy 1% of all the arable land on planet earth; if 2-storeys only half of that, and so on. In other words, high density urban settlement is driven by non-accommodation factors but by other considerations. The choice of settlement types is very great. This fact alone should spur a radical rethink of settlement patterns. Rubanisation is one such pattern.

Rubanisation is a phase evolved from the conditions emanating from industrialisation. The megacities, suburbs, hyper-production and consumption, environmental degradation etc., have reached a matured stage and is beginning to spoil. Singapore is in the cusp of just such a situation. Rubanisation is the logical next stage. The vast capital resources have now to be redeployed to build the infrastructure necessary for Rubanisation. In this fundamental sense, Singapore's economy and power structure has reached its apogee. It has to reconcile with the region and begin to play a catalytic role in transforming the region, making poverty eradication a key plank in its endeavours. In the process, “win friends and influence people”.

Labels: Asian, ideology, work-live-learn-play-farm

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Tuesday, December 15, 2009

Ruban Workshop II: Rubanising Bukit Panjang, 14-15 Nov, Dairy Farm

Site observations
Participants of the workshop formed smaller groups to visit various parts of Bukit Panjang, with the general intent of studying the feasibility of implementing urban farming as part of our plans for rubanising the district.

(Click on images to enlarge, and click again to close. )

Ideating over a large google map
Back at the office, observations gathered from the site visits were promptly mapped out. Opportunities for urban farming and more park connectors were identified, and more ideas generated.

The outcome of the workshop
In the span of two days, a future scenario for Bukit Panjang was generated. In the map below, each of the four circles represents a relatively self-sustainable ruban district with a radius of 500m (walking distance). Existing schools are denoted in blue, existing social and commercial centres in yellow, hypothetical farms in green and cycling and pedestrian tracks by the orange tape. Each ruban circle centers itself around a social/commercial centre, and this would be the basis for the organisation of bicycle tracks and pedestrian walkways within the circle. (More detailed designs for these will have to be undertaken.)

The future of Bukit Panjang?

The cultivation area required for self-sufficiency in vegetables is taken to be 1.5 sqm per person.
For a population of 100,000 people in Bukit Panjang estate, the total cultivation area required would be 150,000 sqm (as reflected in the map above). This is to be divided into three categories: a majority of 100,000 sqm for commercial farms, 40,000 sqm for community farms and 10,000 sqm for individual hobby farms.

Given the extent of canals in Bukit Panjang, commercial farms could be established over them (as seen below). In this way no additional land area is required.

Rubanising urban areas calls for minimal intervention. The existing infrastructure - take, for instance, the rooftops of multi-storey carparks - should be utilised.

The early planting of fruits such as pineapples and bananas could promote community bonding over quick, shared returns.

Level differences present us with farming opportunities. Grassy slopes that are presently not utilised in any way could be terraced for the cultivation of fruit trees.

With regard to the role of the existing LRT infrastructure in a rubanised setting, it was concluded that walking and/or cycling should remain the primary mode of transportation within the town, with the existing LRT and bus lines playing a supplementary role. The Park Connectors should therefore be extended.

More sketches below:

Labels: urban farming, walking distance, workshop

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