Belinda Yuen, as both a town planner and a researcher, is interested in urban areas and their development. She was trained in the United Kingdom and it is, she thinks, a little symptomatic that no training in urban planning is available in Singapore, a megacity, although it is among the cities in Asia that are growing at colossal speed.‘Roughly 60 per cent of the entire global urban population live in Asian cities. Very rapid migration to urban areas is under way and will bring major problems, since the homes and infrastructure needed to receive all the new residents are lacking,’ she says.
What is more, the emergence of ‘megacities’ with populations exceeding ten million is taking place mainly in Asia, which already has Mumbai, New Delhi, Bangkok, Peking and Shanghai to name but a few.
Growing pains
‘Asia faces an enormous challenge, with phenomenal costs, when it comes to planning so that the new urban residents can live a tolerable life. Most of them move to the cities in the hope of achieving a higher standard of living but instead, the urban scene is a disappointment for many,’ Yuen continues.
She compares Asia’s current urbanisation to the process that characterised the rise of industrialism. But the scale is so much bigger in Asia, where the total daily influx of migrants into large cities is estimated at some 100,000.
‘The absolute biggest problem is that there aren’t enough homes. One effect of this housing shortage is the creation of various slum areas where the supply of electricity or clean water for residents is inadequate,’ she says.
Deforestation
The lack of infrastructure and money are creating new problems.
‘Some of the migrants who are arriving can’t afford gas for heating, for example,’ Yuen continues. ‘Instead, they go out in the woods and cut their own firewood, which contributes to undesired deforestation and emission problems.’
With the soaring urban population, towns and cities are also spreading fast. Urban spread is very often uncontrolled or planning is entirely absent. Given the difficulty of finding homes within the urban areas, many people are settling in small communities just outside large cities, and the parts eventually become a single conurbation.’
Theory and practice
One way of solving the problem of land shortages for housebuilding is to erect more high-rise blocks. This is common in Shanghai, in particular. One of Belinda Yuen's research projects sought to find out why people choose to live in 40-storey buildings. The view and better air quality proved to be among the most common reasons why people left the ground floor. These findings are immediately applicable to urban planning.
‘If the planners don’t know the reasons why people choose to move into skyscrapers, they risk planning and building blocks that no one wants to live in. So researchers have a key role in providing knowledge for the planning and design of sustainable cities,’ Yuen points out.
Various disciplines
The fact that Belinda Yuen works in both urban planning and research is no coincidence. In her research projects, she attempts to engage municipal officers at various levels and in different agencies, so that the knowledge obtained is really put to use. People who take decisions must become well informed, she thinks, and very often this calls for knowledge from several different disciplines.
‘Working in one’s own research field is no longer enough. The world and its trends are far too complex for that. So it’s vital both to work in an interdisciplinary way and also to disseminate, and to some extent translate, the knowledge that’s acquired, to make it useful,’ Belinda Yuen concludes.
