URA's Draft Master Plan 2019: Make Singapore's CBD great again

Apr 7, 2019

Christine Li


The announcement of Singapore's Draft Master Plan 2019 last month cast the spotlight on the central area.

The blueprint is the Government's effort to ensure that the "work, live and play" concept fully takes root, to enhance the country's status as a talent hub.

The plans for the Central Business District (CBD) present tremendous opportunities for place-making, curating experiences around working, living and playing in the zone.

The people-centric approach is in step with the ever-changing lifestyle needs of the millennial generation.

This idea is not new, as the vision of a vibrant 24/7 Marina Bay was first unveiled more than a decade ago, but those earlier efforts did not yield the desired outcome.

Today, apartments in the CBD remain more accessible to affluent and high-net-worth individuals because property prices there are beyond the reach of the less wealthy. Local families shun this neighbourhood, owing to the lack of amenities, childcare and school options for young children.

The target pool of residents remains mostly expatriates, singles and dual income, no-kids (Dink) couples.

The traditional CBD has also not kept pace with a new breed of young urbanites looking for a new lifestyle. Commercial buildings, particularly in the Cecil Street, Shenton Way/Tanjong Pagar and Anson areas, are largely isolated. The average building age is around 24 years and only a handful have undergone redevelopment.

The Urban Redevelopment Authority's Draft Master Plan 2019 is trying to steer away from this perception by introducing the CBD Incentive Scheme, which encourages the conversion of older office buildings into mixed-use projects such as those involving residences and hotels to attract a larger pool of residents and transient populations such as business travellers and leisure tourists.

By granting commercial landlords bonus plot ratio increases of 25 per cent to 30 per cent, together with a potential lease top-up for entire mixed-use developments, the scheme opens up many permutations for redevelopment for commercial landlords.

Private owners can also take advantage of this to divest older assets to developers and operators who have the expertise in mixed-use developments. So we can expect a wave of redevelopment over the next 10 to 20 years.

Apart from the CBD, the authority also said that more homes will be introduced in city locations such as Orchard, Pearl's Hill, Marina Bay and Marina South, offering residents a greater variety of city living options, with easy access to transport and employment nodes, lifestyle and recreational choices.

Such moves are headed in the right direction if Singapore is to truly become a liveable global city.

London stands out as the most coveted place to live in the world. It is a hub for everything from entertainment, business and education to multi-culturalism.

Central London is also home to some of the world's top universities and high-quality educational institutions attracting about 103,000 international students to the city. It is the people who make London great.

Can we make the CBD here more inclusive to the masses so that it will evolve into a business and residential community? This can be done by extensively adopting co-living concepts in the city centre so that the average Singaporean has the chance to live closer to their workplace.

We can also consider allowing training facilities, fintech institutes or wealth management campuses to be included in mixed-use developments. This would present even greater opportunities for the movement of people in and out of the city centre through more student exchange and internship programmes.

Residential developers and hotel operators should be allowed to explore innovative ways to inject life into the residential and hotel developments with few boundaries.

As long as the objectives of optimising CBD land and bringing life back to the city centre after office hours are met, rules such as having no more than six unrelated people in a tenanted unit should be relaxed to increase the attractiveness of city living, making this transformational journey for the CBD most meaningful.

• The writer is senior director and head of research at Cushman & Wakefield, Singapore.