Tengah will be Singapore’s first smart and sustainable town, with green features and smart technologies.
Giant solar-powered air conditioners, vacuum garbage collection, subterranean roads for electric vehicles, urban farms and green architecture. Put them all together and you have Tengah, Singapore’s most ambitious project yet to build the city of the future.
Tengah, which means ‘center’ in the local Malay language, is part of Singapore’s effort to reduce a carbon footprint that’s bigger than some countries that are 50 times its size and to promote sustainability in energy, water and waste.
Key to reaching that goal will be to tackle the city’s debilitating tropical heat and humidity, while cutting the nation’s ever-rising energy bill for air-conditioning.
Priority actions:
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To slow the increase, the new town will use a district cooling network based on a commercial system in Singapore’s Marina Bay Financial District, where refrigeration plants and pipes were laid underground before the offices were built.
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In Tengah, the cooling units will be solar powered and installed on rooftops of public-housing blocks, with chilled water piped through the buildings.
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Once the site of brickworks and pepper plantations, the new town will have five districts with community farming, garden and forest themes. A 100 meter-wide, 5 kilometer-long corridor of trees will run through the district, connecting it with the island’s central nature reserve.
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Each of the 42,000 government-built apartments will have a "smart" dashboard that allows homeowners to monitor energy consumption.
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Rail networks, access roads and parking lots will mostly be below ground, freeing space for gardens, urban farming and for walking and cycling.
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An automatic pneumatic waste conveyance system will collect trash through underground pipes.
