Book Launch; Silicon Singapore. Urban Projects for Hybrid and Resilient Innovation Districts by Oscar Carracedo

Silicon Singapore. Urban Projects for Hybrid and Resilient Innovation Districts

Author: Oscar Carracedo

Publisher: Basheer

Cities are naturally complex systems in constant change and adaptation. In the past few decades several factors such as innovation and technological advances, changes in the structure of employment, and new working and productive patterns, have given way to a process of “de-industrialisation” and the rise of the service economy, particularly noticeable in highly developed cities. This shift in the production patterns, comparable to the previous industrial revolutions, has a strong physical impact in the urban industrial tissues with the delocalisation of activities, resource sharing, automatized and miniaturised production, and the knowledge-based economy among other characteristics.

Coupled with these processes, increasing urbanisation, population growth, claim for better urban environment standards that improve the quality of life urban and the life-work balance, and mitigation of climate change confer to industrial areas a key role in the future (re)development and (re)generation of cities. Thus, industrial areas constitute an opportunity to intellectually discuss and critically rethink their transformation and repositioning in future urban scenarios.

Silicon Singapore offers inspiration to future design solutions for hybrid developments that will impact the transformation of industrial estates into integrated and optimised mixed-use areas. It provides critical thinking regarding the current and future scenarios and traditional planning and design approaches. In essence, Silicon Singapore is a contribution to the current debates and the future perspectives on the implications of complex hybrid living —the coexistence between living, technology, productivity, and ecology— as a way to impact the future (re)development of industrial estates into ‘integrated productive tEC(h)Osystems’. In other words, alternative models of urbanity that unify technology and ecosystems to deliver integrated, high-dense, productive, high-quality, vibrant, resilient, and sustainable urban living environments.

A research supported by: JTC