At the launch of this pandemic resilience page in October 2020, it is still uncertain how the COVID-19 pandemic will pan out, hence even more challenging to predict with certainty what the ‘new normal’ will be after the great disruption.
Most analysts seem to support the notion of living with COVID-19 for a considerable period, with many scenarios projecting that COVID-19 will be brought under various degrees of control but not entirely eradicated, reducing it from being a pandemic to waves of epidemic.
Even if COVID-19 comes to pass, a future scenario of Disease X – a possibly serious yet unknown epidemic that is more deadly, more contagious, and mutates easily is always lurking in the shadow.
So the central question for societies and us as individuals is, since life has been changed forever by the COVID-19 pandemic with the need to be prepared for the next pandemic or epidemic, shouldn’t we view the necessary changes as opportunities to catalyst positive, long-term transformation that otherwise were difficult to implement?
In the context of the built environment, let’s start by developing Pandemic Resilience as a new dimension of urban resilience. As we find creative solutions, adapt our lifestyles, deploy technology, and develop new and improved processes towards pandemic resilience, there will be opportunities to engender long-ranging economic, social and environmental transformation, providing systemic solutions to social equity, ageing society, new energy, climate change, ecological regeneration, etc.
At CPG, to set ourselves thinking, our multi-disciplinary experts have responded by engaging in inter-disciplinary discourse internally and with our various stakeholders, so as to organise our ideas and thoughts about such possibilities. We share the ideas with the hope that it sparks more ideas, and invite like-minded people to collaborate and co-create solutions for complex problems.
Healthcare
Healthcare
In recent decades, notable changes in aging demographics and rising healthcare costs are causing a shift in the healthcare paradigm for Singapore. Such challenges are not dissimilar to other advanced economies with low birth rates. In response to the rising challenges, two of the forces that are shaping the paradigm shift in healthcare sector are:
accelerated adoption of technologies and a renewed focus on more holistic well-being of patients and staff in a digitally-connected and information-rich era.
In a time when many believe that advanced science and medicine have brought communicable diseases under control, COVID-19 serves as a stern reminder that people are still highly vulnerable and susceptible to new pathogens. In fact, many have warned that the likelihood of unpredictable pandemics is on the rise as a result of increasing globalisation, urbanisation, and human encroachment on animal habitats.
Rapid technological advancements such as in the recent years have expanded possibilities and brought new solutions to meet healthcare challenges. Increasingly, healthcare is less restricted by physical healthcare facilities and becoming a value network of physical and digital infrastructure that reaches out to communities and other industries. In the brave new world, holistic pandemic-resilient strategies underpinned by a robust healthcare eco-system will enable individuals to exercise choices to embrace wellness that lead to a state of holistic health.
Education
Education
The COVID-19 pandemic provides an opportunity to rethink educational objectives and how they can be met, following which our immediate challenge will be to incorporate the lessons learnt through the pandemic experience by preparing education institutions and facilities to be pandemic resilient. We are anticipating at least three notable trends.
Firstly, technology for home-based learning has been accelerated by COVID-19 to become a big part of modern education. The design of education facilities needs to be reimagined to go beyond pandemic preparedness and to support a holistic digital education pedagogy by embracing a distributed model in terms of activity density, spatial and temporal programming, as well as technological adaptation. Current school spaces must also be curated to adapt to the flexible transformation during a pandemic.
Social distancing measures need not be a compromise but instead, an enhancement to learning, particularly in optimising on-premise education as opportunities for face-to-face interaction. Even as we implement social distancing measures, they could be deployed to support learning.
Last but not least, with the rise of digital competencies, education must continue to strive to instill core values and social empathy in students in this digital age. One silver lining of this pandemic is the display of a spirit of caring and community support to uplift the vulnerable. Education must thus continue to be the cornerstone to imbue such human values.
Workplaces
Workplaces
Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, the conversation about future working trends had mainly revolved around mode shifts expected to transform work: new behaviours shaped by social media; technological changes such as cloud computing and IoT, etc.; the millennial workforce and changing attitudes; mobility across space, time, and devices; and globalisation. Some changes did happen, however traditional work continued to occupy a central place.
The COVID-19 outbreak induced the sudden abandonment of traditional modes of working. Organisations had to adapt to work-from-home (WFH) in only a matter of days. While most have managed to do so, it is imperative to address through our future design, solutions to challenges such as pandemic readiness in the workplace with spatial norms to support social distancing, decentralisation for workers’ well-being etc. We can do so by drawing knowledge learnt from the Healthcare sector and adapting some of these measures.
This re-thinking process also presents opportunities to redefine the role of workplaces. Workplace environments are after all essential for facilitating physical interaction to foster human relationships. However, its traditional function as a place to house workers to get things done will diminish. We anticipate two trends. Firstly, how cyber-physical integrated workplaces will be transforming the future of work with flexibility - work anytime anywhere with self-ownership and enhancement of skill development facilitated by digital platforms. Secondly, how such shifts drive adaptive transformation of how urban environment is used.
Retail & Community
Retail & Community
The retail sector was already facing challenges from new technology, evolving consumer trends and competition from e-commerce even before the COVID-19 crisis. Then, brick-and-mortar stores were vying for market share with omni-channel retail and e-commerce players with digitalised platforms. With the COVID-19 pandemic, shops and businesses had to close down temporarily.
Many who previously did not shop online have been converted during this period. Singapore’s Circuit Breaker and containment measures of other cities have shown that movement restrictions are bearable if one’s essential needs could be met within a short radius from their homes.
Singapore’s HDB’s township planning model comprising a town centre and several precincts, each having its neighbourhood centres providing accessible amenities and essential services certainly help supported many Singaporeans living in the heartlands through challenging times.
Lifestyle changes forced upon us by the pandemic will continue to pose challenges to the retail sector. We believe a few trends will emerge. First, physical retail stores have to remain relevant by offering customer experience that online shopping cannot offer. Second, new demand drivers could take up the excess spaces in retail malls, which are freed up by redundant businesses.
Third, accessible mixed-use community facilities near to one’s residence will grow, and its functions further diversified. We believe the pandemic had accelerated Retail 4.0: The transformation of retail sector in the fourth industrial revolution.
Transport
Transport
The unprecedented nature of the COVID-19 pandemic has reshaped our cities with new norms such as telecommuting and home-based education systems, resulting in drastic changes to individuals’ travel patterns and travel demand during peak hours.
With these changes likely to remain so in the foreseeable future, mobility planning should accept and account for these variations in order to rethink what sustainable and liveable city means whilst minimising transmission risks in the transport systems.As industry stakeholders, we must come together to find ways to leverage on the potential benefits brought about by changes in mobility patterns.
We shall discuss 3 broad trends – urban travel characteristics, infrastructure provision and technological advancements.
Firstly, changes in travel characteristics are leading to staggered or flattened demand. Next, existing transport infrastructure could be repurposed and redesigned based on these demand variations. Conscious efforts should be invested in Active Mobility as part of a sustainable transport solution and to strengthen the public transport system. The concept of de-centralised cities for smarter use of transport network is an obvious strategy, but had seemed challenging to implement pre-COVID-19.
COVID-19 had surprised everyone, and demonstrated that it could be done. Lastly, technological advancements would play a crucial role towards constructing a demand responsive and seamlessly integrated network platform. Moving forward, these trends can contribute towards building a resilient and healthy transport ecosystem.
Open & Green Spaces
Open & Green Spaces
The recent pandemic has shown globally, how many cities struggle to adapt to new protocols brought about by a health crisis. The United Nations estimated that 68% of the global population will be urbanised by 2050, so it is crucial that we adapt our planning and designing approaches to embrace a new dimension of pandemic-resilience in visioning, designing, and implementing sustainable cities.
With regard to open, green and blue spaces in cities, firstly, there is a need to understand how environmental factors and health seeking behaviors contribute to recreational use of green and blue infrastructure during a pandemic, and the corresponding wellness benefits it results in. Next, if such use-benefits correlation is validated, the potential of the green and blue infrastructure serving as wellness facilities could be further explored.
Lastly, there is a need to re-evaluate space distribution within cities to accommodate social distancing protocols. Flexibility is key, with a focus on proactive measures to enable ease of conversion in publicopen spaces when needed. For example, parking lots and pedestrian pathways which can be converted to fit requirements of changing conditions, or even increased al fresco dining spaces to alleviate indoor seating constraints.
A decentralisation approach is also critical for more equitable distribution of land and resources, providing a means for smaller scale interaction so that people can continue with their daily lives without experiencing drastic changes.
Smart Estate & Facilities Management
Smart Estate & Facilities Management
As global businesses were disrupted by the pandemic, many organisations had to deal with sudden operational changes. Pandemic response plans need to factor in a safe working environment for all, and facility systems need to accommodate new working arrangements. Data analytics has become ubiquitous in healthcare, online-retail, banking, and manufacturing, but has found limited application in estate and facilities management despite the increasing technological maturity of digitised data intelligence platforms.
The pandemic has driven the need for digitisation in this space, since data helps estate and facility managers assess and plan corresponding measures to keep operational disruptions to a minimum. As an example, a unified remote Operations Command Centre allows facilities management to be conducted during a pandemic while observing social distancing protocols. It can control multiple building performance data and make predictions on user patterns, so that workplace policies may be adapted to limit the spread of infectious diseases with access restrictions, rerouting paths to control human traffic etc.
The building data can also help plan security, sanitary and hygiene measures when a pandemic situation arises, strengthening an organisation’s pandemic resilience.
With maturing technology, the next frontier is the development of digital twins of the estates and facilities, supporting process and functional integration of not only backend operations such as facilities management, but also front-end operations to improve user experience and place-making through predictive analytics, automation, robotics, contactless interaction, and service integration, etc.