Thread by @DellAnnaLuca

URBAN PLANNING AND LOCALISM:
How Singapore managed (in a measure) to reconcile the two.
(thread)

First, a disclaimer: Singapore is a city-state & island. Most of the things it does are not reproducible at larger scales. Still, some are best practices (and some not)

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Disclaimer #2: most of what I wrote here, I learned from a government-organized exhibition & from talking with locals. It is definitely not the full picture. The info I got is perhaps biased. I do not live here.

That said, I will talk here about principles. It will be useful.

3/ One thing I liked is the abundance of local heuristics used. For example: "when a new building is built, it must contain (on the rooftop, on balconies or on the ground) the same amount of plants that would be there if the land was empty".

4/ IMHO, the above is a superior approach than building a park here and there (which they do too, but it doesn't work as the only solution).

5/ Another thing I liked is the fractality. The city is divided into districts which are then divided into blocks (which are LARGE, impermeable to cars of non-residents, and which contain a few housing buildings and shops, usually).

6/ Urban decisions are trickled down: the governmental planning office only decides zoning (which is broader than in other countries and which is fractalized, i.e., most districts contain a bit of everything); then the district council decides at the block level.

7/ This is a good approach, because decisions are taken at the scale that contains those who understand them.

It's definitely not perfect in this island, and only partially implemented, but better than other implementations I've seen in other countries.

8/ Logistics follow a "district hub" basis, designed to minimize transportation and to ensure that "the last mile" is managed in a different way than the rest
(pic below; at least in newer areas)

My understanding is that those hubs are managed locally too (but I might be wrong).

9/ I already wrote a thread explaining the importance of fractalism:

https://twitter.com/DellAnnaLuca/status/1115788163643990017

10/ Top-down decisions coming from centralized governments fail because they neglect second-order effects; namely, how the environment or the population will react to the first-order effects and how it will adjust its behavior (we live in a dynamic world).

Instead,

11/ Decisions taken by locals tend to be more robust to second-order effects because the locals know themselves or their neighbors and have therefore a better possibility to predict second-order effects.

Moreover,

12/ Whereas central governments are generally immune to second order effects (they are too far from them in the temporal and in the social dimensions), locals cannot escape them. Therefore, locals are more incentivized to take them into account, even & especially unconsciously.

13/ Okay, this thread started being about Singapore and then diverged to the importance of localism and fractalism (fractalism being how localism is guaranteed as macro-scale increases).

Here is a link to the paper which inspired the latter part: academia.edu/38433249/Multi…

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(cc: @devonzuegel for urbanism, @normonics for localism, @visakanv for SG)

14/ BTW, 2 years ago I interviewed Estonia’s ministry of IT to discover what could be replicated in larger countries.

Sadly, almost everything they did is scale-dependent and hard to replicate in countries one order of magnitude larger.

Unless fractalism, of course.