For most of its modern history, to speak of Singapore was to speak of the Singapore River, physical centre of the city and site of the greater part of the colony's entrepot trade. The river has been transformed over the last 25 years from a polluted industrial sewer choked with traffic to a clean, placid waterway that forms the centrepiece of Singapore's financial, civic and entertainment districts. This transformation symbolizes the city-state's efforts to remake itself for the 21st century.Stephen Dobbs sets out the history of this waterway, and of the people who made it their home and workplace. He describes the tidal swamp in the early days of the British settlement, where merchants ignored Raffles much-vaunted city plan and built their businesses on the limited high ground along the marshy riverbanks.Later, even as the long distance shipping moved to new port facilities elsewhere on the island, the river remained the base for a large regional trade, and boatmen and businessmen struggled to cope with silting, over-crowding, and bridges that were too low to be passed at high tide.Looking at the post-war years, Dobbs zeros in on the boatmen who carried goods between the "e;godowns"e; or warehouses along the river and the freighters lying at anchor in the roads. Despite its pollution, the river remained home to a vital community of coolies and tally clerks, and the tumultuous urban life that swirled around them.Today the waterfront community has been relocated. The shophouses and warehouses along the river are now chic cafes and upmarket restaurants, fish have returned to the Singapore River, and urban dwellers stroll on walks along the river's edge.Blending social history, geography, economic history and urban studies, this book will be of interest to anyone wishing to understand Singapore's many transformations during the past two centuries.

Blending social history, geography, economic history and urban studies, Stephen Dobbs sets out the history of the Singapore river and of the people who made it their home and workplace. This text should be of interest to anyone wishing to understand Singapore's numerous transformations.

Discover how the Singapore government rehabilitated the Singapore River and created Marina Bay, transforming both into lifestyle/commercial settings.

50 Years of Urban Planning in Singapore is an accessible and comprehensive volume on Singapore's planning approach to urbanization. Organized into three parts, the first section of the volume, 'Paradigms, Policies, and Processes', provides an overview of the ideologies and strategies underpinning urban planning in Singapore; the second section, 'The Built Environment as a Sum of Parts', delves into the key land use sectors of Singapore's urban planning system; and the third section, 'Urban Complexities and Creative Solutions', examines the challenges and considerations of planning for the Singapore of tomorrow. The volume brings together the diverse perspectives of practitioners and academics in the professional and research fields of planning, architecture, urbanism, and city-making.

In conjunction with Singapore's 50th birthday in August 2015, 50 Years of Environment: Singapore's Journey Towards Environmental Sustainability takes the reader through Singapore's environmental journey over the past 50 years, to its present day challenges and solutions, and seeks to explore what lies ahead for Singapore's environmental future. This book is divided into three parts. The first, drawn largely from the book Clean, Green and Blue: Singapore's Journey Towards Environmental and Water Sustainability, will explore the historical developments in Singapore's environmental journey and the development of NEWater. The second part will be a collection of essays that examine the present environmental challenges that Singapore faces and the ways in which it is addressing those issues through community engagement, international engagement, research and technology, and industry solutions in order to develop sustainable strategies and solutions. Part Three will bring the book to a close by tying the historical and contemporary threads together and discusses the future challenges for Singapore's environment.

Rapid technological, economic, social and cultural changes are transforming the idea of "Asian space." With the shift to a global economy and an urban population explosion, Asian cities have become a mainstay of progress, national pride, identity, and positioning on the global stage. The extraordinary pace and intensity of the changes have created a situation unique in the history of urban development. Despite the immense diversity of Asian countries, "Asia-ness" is often treated as a distinctive quality that has emerged from unique recent circumstances affecting Asian urbanizations as a whole. In Future Asian Space, 15 authors explore broad concepts relating to the creation and re-creation of "Asian space" and contemporary Asian identity, and their examination of different sites and research approaches highlights the difficulty of pinpointing what Asia-ness is, or might become. Appropriate design and planning of cities is a critical element in building a sustainable future and coping with environmental, social and cultural problems. Future Asian Space is designed to stimulate interests and engagement in discussions of the Asian city, and its trajectories in architecture and urbanism, but the authors' conclusions will intrigue anyone interested in the future of cities and urban life in Asia.

This book describes the journey of Singapore ́s development and the fundamental role that water has had in shaping it. What makes this case so unique is that the quest for self-sufficiency in terms of water availability in a fast-changing urban context has been crucial to the way development policies and agendas have been planned throughout the years.