About the Conference
As the world moves toward becoming 70% urbanized by 2050, expansive thinking and planning needs to be undertaken now, urgently, in order to ensure that cities can be places where people can thrive. To achieve this, we must do more than simply increase density – we need to integrate tall buildings into the urban and societal fabric, such that they become part of the physical and cultural infrastructure as never before. Transportation, public facilities, open space and commercial functions all need to be holistically synchronized and pivoted toward positive outcomes for a much broader swath of society.
The 2020 CTBUH Conference, Humanizing High Density—People, Nature & the Urban Realm, focuses on the essential question of how high-density can support equitable and healthy living, working and social well-being. It brings issues of livability to the forefront of the discourse about future cities, concerned with achieving equity in housing, making better social spaces at multiple horizons, mitigating the effects of climate change, and developing architecture and urban designs that are appropriate for local environmental and cultural conditions.
There is no better place to have this urgent conversation about tomorrow than in Singapore. The city-state, once one of the poorest in Asia at its inception in the early 1960s, committed to a concerted effort to improve quality of life for all citizens, and to become a major commercial, finance, shipping and innovation hub in the process.
Social and economic sustainability are held to equally high standards. More than 80 percent of the population lives in high-quality, publicly-financed high-rise housing. Communities are designed to be integrated by factors of age, ethnicity, and income. The physical layout of high-rise communities often features sky-parks connecting towers at height with publicly accessible space. Commercial and industrial hubs are carefully located, so as to optimize the use of scarce land resources and drive economic growth, without compromising green objectives.
A major component of this strategy is the “city in a garden” concept. Taking advantage of the tropical climate, Singapore provides incentives to increase green density with new construction, blurring the boundaries between “urban” and “natural” habitat, sheltering people from the island’s intense heat and sunshine, and advancing the proven benefits of greenery on the human psyche.
The world can learn much from Singapore, even if not all its achievements and policies are replicable elsewhere. Its strategies have been successful because they are deeply embedded in unified government policy that affects the entire built environment. All cities can improve the alignment of societal, economic, and environmental goals and incentives to generate better outcomes. As a world-class convention and travel destination, and a living laboratory of urban experimentation, there is no substitute for experiencing it first-hand. We therefore invite you to join CTBUH in Singapore in the autumn of 2020, where the vital conversation of “Humanizing High Density” will flourish.
About CTBUH
The Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat is the world’s leading resource for professionals focused on the inception, design, construction, and operation of tall buildings and future cities. CTBUH facilitates the exchange of the latest knowledge available on tall buildings through publications, research, events, web resources, and international representation.
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