Imagine you are in an aeroplane winging its way out of Changi Airport. Have a look out the window. It's going to have to be a quick, cursory glance, because you're not going to have much of a chance to see Singapore before your aircraft flies into either Malaysian or Indonesian airspace. But assuming you do manage to catch a fleeting glimpse of Singapore before your view is obscured by the clouds, what would you see?

You would see an island forty-two kilometres long and twenty-three kilometres wide, but more important than these mere statistics, you would see an island which is the birthplace of Singaporeans like you and me - you would see, in short, our home.

But just how much do we know about our home? Sure, our view from the airplane would reveal an impressive skyline dominated by skyscrapers and housing board flats, it would reveal the busiest port in the world (in terms of shipping tonnage), and yes, it has to be said, it would also reveal a thousand hectares or so of more than twenty golf courses. But have you ever wondered: is that all there is to Singapore?

This book is designed especially for those of us who have asked that question, but have been hard put to answer it satisfactorily. It is primarily a book about geography (specifically the geography of Singapore).

Before going further, it would be useful to clarify exactly what we mean by the term 'geography'. The dry, dictionary definition of the word is "the science of the Earth's form, physical features, climate [?], population etc.". I can hear you yawning already.

No! Geography is about much more than studying about mountains and rivers (although you will be reading about them in this book!) - if the truth be told, it is about practically everything around us, from your favourite shopping centre, to the Mass Rapid Transit (MRT) train which might be rumbling past right now, and, of course, to contemporary phenomena like the Internet. When you have finished this book, you will discover that you would have learnt some geography without even realizing it. In fact, if you are still schooling, you will find that the higher you go up the education ladder, the harder it is for you to define exactly what geography is and to pin it down.

To date, Singapore's territorial [?] land area is around 660 square kilometres. As we have all been told for as long as we can remember, we do not live in a very large country. In fact, to put it bluntly, we are one of the smallest countries in the world. This sets some very real limits to how far our population can continue to grow in Singapore. So what?, I hear some of you say, no big deal, we can always reclaim [?] land.

While this may be true, and while land reclamation projects will add another ninety square kilometres to our land area by the year 2030, there is in fact a limit to how far this can be kept up.

At the very least, if we continue to reclaim, we will eventually infringe our neighbours' waters - but we would of course encounter many practical problems (not least among them being the depth of water - areas deeper than fifteen metres are uneconomic to reclaim - and the competing need for sea-lanes and anchorages) way before we reach the territorial limit (according to the 1982 United Nations Convention on Law of the Sea, every state may claim territorial waters not exceeding twelve nautical miles from the coastal baseline. Regionally, Singapore has rights within three nautical miles of its shoreline, however, due to the close proximity of some parts of the coastline to our neighbours, the territorial rights of the Straits of Singapore are shared).

How exactly is land reclaimed from the sea in Singapore? It is a six-stage process. First, in planning and design, the proposed site is investigated to determine the soil conditions and profile of the seabed. The method of construction can then be decided on.

Second is the Environmental Impact Assessment. Computers are used to simulate the effect of reclamation on surrounding water, in terms of tidal flow, patterns, water level, sedimentation and water quality. Only when it is known that there will not be adverse effects can approval be obtained from Parliament for reclamation to take place.

Third are the soil improvement works. Generally the foreshore of Singapore comprises soft marine clay, which has to be stabilized through soil improvement. After this, bunds are built around the perimeter of the reclamation using seabed sand. The area within the bund is then gradually filled up with more marine sand. If the area within the bund is deep, sand can be directly dumped by hopper barges, operating within the bund.

When the water depth is too shallow for the barges to manoeuvre, the sand is dumped outside the bund and pumped in by cutter suction dredge. A sand spreader barge spreads the sand evenly within the bund. The cutter suction dredge continues to pump even when the water surface is breached.

The sand used to reclaim land is imported and costly. The possibility of using soil excavated from construction sites, and clay dredged from the seabed (in order to maintain sea-lane depth), is being studied instead. In fact, about eighty percent (or 7.6 million cubic metres) of the soil excavated from the building of the $5 billion northeast MRT line will be used for embankments and back-filling. This will ease the pressure on Pulau Semakau. Clay has not been used extensively in reclamation before, because it takes at least thirty times longer to dry than sand.

The final process of filling is the fourth stage - that of sand compaction. This done by roller.

The fifth stage is protecting the shore from wave erosion and current action through the construction of sea-walls.

Finally, the newly reclaimed land is left for about two years to consolidate naturally.

Virtually There at Marina East - an 845 k QuickTime VR panorama, showing the contrast between reclaimed land - old and new.

Having agreed therefore that we live in an areally-challenged country, we need to realize how this has influenced the nature of the man-land relationship in Singapore. In fact, the areal constraint overrides and distorts how the relationship works, as compared to countries with a more typical land area.

To illustrate this point, at a very fundamental level, all agricultural activities remaining in Singapore are confined to 1700 hectares of agrotechnology parks [?] in areas like Lim Chu Kang and Murai. This is only because we need to maximize how our farmland is used.

If we did not regulate our farmland, one possible scenario would be that our farmers would be priced out of the market because they would not be able to compete with the big commercial players who want the land [?] to develop more condominiums. We would then have to be totally dependent on other countries for agricultural products. There would be very little control over the prices we will have to pay for our food, not to mention the standards of hygiene and nutritional value.

Another scenario of an unregulated agriculture in Singapore would be that in an effort to cut costs in order to compete, farmers might compromise on the quality of seed and fertilizer used, as well as on the proper disposal of sewage. Untreated waste may find its way into our water supply, which together with poorer quality greens in the markets, will have consequent detrimental results to the population in general.

If this is true of agriculture in Singapore, it is also true of practically every other land-use, from financial services, to manufacturing industry, and even to the training areas for the Singapore Armed Forces. Roads will take up sixteen percent of our land area - four percentage points more than housing! Land for the military takes up twenty percent, and water catchment - a whopping forty percent. Everything has to have its place in Singapore. We simply could not afford for it not to be so.

Singapore has adopted a three-pronged strategy to address these issues of conflicting demands for land-use. First is to remove or reduce the constraints. This includes using technology to decrease the level of air- and noise-pollution. For example, if rubber tyres were used on MRT trains, rides would be quieter and residences could be built nearer the tracks, because the width of the buffer would have been reduced. Similarly, trees and shrubs have been planted along the Pan-Island Expressway so that, together with the use of a special porous asphalt road surfacing known as 'drainage mix' (which itself cuts traffic noise by at least three decibels), it can be widened to be as close as twenty metres of residences.

Another example would be to build caverns, Common Services Tunnels and Deep-Tunnel Sewerage Systems (DTSS) - the latter would release 290 hectares (an area half the size of Ang Mo Kio New Town) for redevelopment by 2015 by having two tunnels - a total of eighty kilometres long, 6.5 metres in diameter and up to ninety metres below ground (nearly four times as deep as the average MRT tunnel) - channel sewage via a 170 kilometre-long network of drainlines, minor, main and link sewers, and drop shafts to two centralised underground waste treatment plants in the reclaimed land at Changi East and Jurong Island, thereby replacing the six existing sewage treatment works (which are land-intensive because a two-hundred-metre-wide buffer is needed to allow odours to dissipate).

The DTSS will cost up to $9 billion, but will be cheaper to operate and maintain than the present system. It will also result in an improvement in the water quality in the Johor Straits because effluent will no longer be discharged there but through deep-sea pipelines into the Singapore Straits, as far as five kilometres offshore (in turn, more waterfront developments and water-based recreational and commercial activities will then be possible along the northern shoreline).

Source: the Straits Times

The second prong is to intensify land-use. In the Singapore context, this usually means building skywards. Under the Selective Enbloc Redevelopment Scheme, for example, certain blocks in older housing estates such as Bedok, Toa Payoh, Ang Mo Kio and Taman Jurong could be demolished and replaced with blocks of thirty or more storeys. Yet the sky is not the limit. In the vicinity of runways, for example, there is a twelve-storey height restriction. Nevertheless building higher does make better use of available land. For example, a typical secondary school in Singapore today occupies three hectares, compared to only 0.4 hectares for the Singapore International School in Hong Kong.

Where building skywards is not feasible, building underground can be investigated. By 2000, the Singapore Cricket Club will have added twelve thousand square metres through the construction of two underground levels to house, among others, an aerobics room, squash courts, and a gymnasium.

Singapore's first car stacking systems is in operation at the carpark at Heritage Place, near Bugis Junction. Using rollers, optic sensors and frames, the cars are stacked on multiple levels.

On a more macro scale, the Jurong Town Corporation, in its Industrial Land Plan for the 21st Century, intends to stretch the use of Singapore's stock of industrial land through the following action plans: redeveloping older industrial estates, making it easier for tenants to sublet excess factory space (or terminate the leases on the excess), providing financial assistance to encourage tenants to improve land productivity, upgrading manufacturing operations to higher value-added activities, and doubling the plot ratio (the ratio of the built-up area to site area) from 0.48 to allow larger buildings.

Another way to intensify land-use is to have multi-purpose facilities. In some parts of Singapore, school fields double as sports fields for the neighbourhood community. By 2000, the rooftop of the podium block of Chinatown Complex will be landscaped to have a jogging track, wading pool, jacuzzi, reflexology path, playground, barbeque pits, multipurpose court and study corners. It will be the first time a podium deck will be used so extensively.

Similarly, the Land Transport Authority (LTA) is working hard to integrate public transport interchanges and commercial land-use at the same site. This has already been done in Woodlands Regional Centre and will soon take place in Toa Payoh, Mountbatten, Ang Mo Kio and Taman Jurong under the Housing and Development Board's (HDB) Estate Renewal Strategy.

The final prong is, of course, to manage demand. This includes educating the younger generation of Singaporeans to be more cognizant of our constraints to growth. Managing traffic flow through Electronic Road Pricing and the Green Link Determining system also falls within this prong, as does the construction of the Marina Line. Additionally, some types of land-use have been given a new lease of life. For example the disused granite quarry at Bukit Batok has been integrated into the town park.

The Park Connector Network, which involves the building of cycling and jogging tracks over existing drainage sewers means that the drainage reserve is no longer merely functional in nature, with no additional land being used. A similar example is the building of a stormwater collection pond beneath the Seletar-Bukit Timah Expressway interchange.

Since Singapore is so small, one might question the worth of dividing it into even smaller regions [?], as Part Three of this book does. The reason for doing so is that there are indeed distinct geographic regions in Singapore, despite its size, and several classifications for these regions exist.

For example, the Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA) uses a subdivision of Singapore based on its Development Guide Plans [?], and this is also shown below.

Source: URA (1991)

Which system of subdivision to use is largely a matter of convenience, depending on what one wishes to analyse.