City Of Singapore Research Articles

Microbial biofilm formation: a need to act.

U. R€omling, S. Kjelleberg, S. Normark, L. Nyman, B. E. Uhlin & B. Akerlund From the Department of Microbiology, Tumor and Cell Biology, Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden; Singapore Centre on Environmental Life Sciences Engineering, Singapore City, Singapore; The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and Karolinska Institutet; Pfizer AB, Stockholm; Department of Molecular Biology, The Laboratory for Molecular Infection Medicine Sweden (MIMS), Ume a Centre for Microbial Research, Ume a University, Ume a; and Unit of Infectious Diseases, Department of Medicine Huddinge, Karolinska University Hospital, Stockholm, Sweden

Cosmopolitan beginnings? Transnational healthcare workers and the politics of carework in Singapore

In recent times, the increasing scholarly interest in the contested place of the migrant in the cities of the North and South has drawn mainly on frameworks of integration, multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism. Much of the literature pays little heed to gender dynamics and accords little value in particular to the roles that female migrants play in actively shaping the urban contexts in which they live. We contend that by shifting attention to the more feminised spheres oriented towards the private sphere away from public display (including that of ‘carework’ which is increasingly performed by female migrant workers), we may be able to better glimpse cosmopolitanism at work. This is because the social relations of care provide more fertile ground for developing what Glick Schiller et al. (2011, Ethnic and Racial Studies 34 399–418) call ‘cosmopolitan sociability’. This is not to negate the findings of feminist analyses that suggest that carework, particularly in globalising cities restructured by neoliberal agendas, reproduces and extends forms of social inequalities. Indeed, even as the locus of carework shifts from local to foreign women from less developed countries, patriarchal norms and unequal gender relations are reinforced, and in fact intersect with other power geometries based on race, nationality and class. As illustration of the politics of carework, this paper discusses the place of migrant healthcare workers (primarily Chinese, Indian, Filipino and Burmese women) in institutionalised settings in the rapidly globalising city of Singapore. While their presence in the global city raises moral anxieties not only about the shift of carework from the family to outside the home, they also alert us to the possibilities and limits of a cosmopolitan approach to care transcending boundaries of race, culture, language and nationality.

Real estate market cyclical dynamics

Purpose– The purpose of this paper is to help us understand the real estate cycle and offers an analysis using a vector auto regression (VAR) model. The authors study the key international cities of Hong Kong, Kuala Lumpur and Singapore. The authors find four key outcomes. One, the real estate cycle is generally different from the underlying business cycle in local markets for the cities studies. Two, the real estate cycle is more exaggerated in the construction and development areas than in rents and vacancies. Three, the vacancy cycle tends to lead the rental cycle. And four, new construction completions tend to peak when vacancy is also peaking. The authors believe that future research should try to help understand the linkages that drive these outcomes. For example, are rigidities in the local permit and construction markets responsible for the link between construction peaks and vacancy peaks?Design/methodology/approach– Real estate market cyclical dynamics and its estimation via VAR model offers an insightful set of practical and empirical models. It affirms a comprehensive theoretical underpinning for analysing the prime office and residential sectors of the capitol cities of Kuala Lumpur, Singapore and Hong Kong in the fast developing Asia region. Its unrestricted form also provides an effective and insightful way of modelling real estate market cyclical dynamics utilising only real estate market indicators, furnished by real estate market data providers.Findings– The office rental VAR model for Singapore (SOR), KL (KOR) and HK (HOR) show good fits. In the HOR model, rents and vacancies are negatively signed and significant for certain lagged relationships with other variables and with rents themselves. The office CV VAR model for Singapore (SOCV), KL (KOCV) and HK (HOCV) show good fits. In the HOCV model, capital values (CVs) and initial yields are negatively signed and significant for certain lagged relationships with other variables and with CVs themselves. Impulse response functions specified for seven years to mirror a medium-term real estate market cycle “die out” to zero for the stationary VAR models that are estimated for the endogenous variables. The accumulated responses asymptote to some non-zero constant.Practical implications– The VAR model offers a complete and meaningful dynamic system of solely real estate variables for international real estate investors and policy makers in decision making. Its unrestricted form offers an effective and insightful way of modelling real estate market cyclical dynamics utilising only real estate market indicators, which can be reliably provided by a dedicated real estate information and consultancy provider of international standing.Originality/value– The theoretical model offers a complete dynamic model system of the real estate space market, comprising a unique system of six linked equations that denote the relationship among supply, demand, construction, vacancy and rent over time, inclusive of price response slopes and lags. The VAR model enables the investigation of the effect of the lagged values of all the variables concerned. It also enables the explicit and rigorous quantitative forecasts of say rents and CVs when the rest of the variable can be forecasted beforehand.

Singapore Rhabdomyosarcoma (RMS) Experience: Shall We Change Our Practice?

Although rhabdomyosarcoma (RMS) constitutes nearly 4% of all children diagnosed with cancer in the ethnically diverse small island city of Singapore, it is unknown how children with RMS fare. This study investigated 50 children with RMS from April 1993 to December 2010 from KK Women's and Children's Hospital (KKH) and National University Hospital (NUH). They were treated either as per Intergroup Rhabdomyosarcoma Study Group (IRSG) or Société Internationale Pediatrique D'Oncologie (SIOP) regimens. Median age of diagnosis was 5.1 years (range, 0.1 to 17.3 years) with a median follow-up of 3.3 years (range, 0.4 to 15.6 years). According to IRSG classifi cation, 18 (36%) were staged as low-risk (LR); 19 (38%) were intermediate-risk (IR), 12 (24%) were high-risk (HR) and it was unknown in 1 patient. Twenty-nine (58%) were of embryonal subtype, 17 (34%) were alveolar and subclassification was not available in 4. The primary sites of tumour were: head and neck region (n = 22); genitourinary (n = 19); extremity (n = 10); and abdomen/retroperitoneal (n = 5). At the time of analysis, 80% were alive with no evidence of disease, 9 were dead of disease, and 2 were alive with disease. By disease risk group, the 5-year event-free survival (EFS) for LR group disease was 81.3% (95% CI, 62.0 to 100.0), IR group was 61.4% (95% CI, 32.3 to 90.4) and HR group was 25.0% (95% CI, 0.0 to 49.5) respectively (P <0.001). The 5-year EFS for risk by chemotherapy received as per SIOP vs per IRSG revealed: LR 83.3% vs 75.0% (P = 0.787); IR 83.3% vs 43.8% (P = 0.351); HR 0.0% vs 42.9% (P = 0.336) respectively. Of 15 relapses (HR, n = 7), at median of 2 years, 4 of 6 patients treated as per SIOP regimen were dead of disease and 3 of 8 treated as per IRSG were alive. Radiation therapy (RT) can be avoided in LR classification although those in higher risk classification need RT to local and distant metastatic disease. The outcome of children with RMS in Singapore can be further improved by coming together as a cooperative group to provide the best total care. Improved communication, multidisciplinary team collaboration, standardisation of protocols and rigorous data collection are keys.

Between History and Heritage: Post-Colonialism, Globalisation, and the Remaking of Malacca, Penang, and Singapore

AbstractThe three cities of Malacca, Penang and Singapore share a century-long history as the British Straits Settlements, with similar multicultural traditions and urban morphology of dense shophouse districts. In the post-colonial period, these have been the basis for the production of heritage for urban renewal, civic identity formation, and international tourism. Yet, each city has approached the production of its history as heritage in different ways. The differences have been specified in terms of whether heritage production has been led by the state, market or civil society, and criticised as ideology or ambivalently interpreted as formative of identity in the face of globalisation. As colonial port-cities integrating into or becoming a new nation-state, I argue that the production of heritage in the three cities is driven by the politics of post-colonial identity interacting with the political economy of urban redevelopment. I argue that the production of heritage is one facet in the production of space and an increasingly important one in globalising Asian urbanisms. We can specify the differences in production of heritage space in the three cities in terms of the orientation of imagination and the ends of production. I show that the three city-states have been interpreting its history for heritage production in either Asian or cosmopolitan imaginations and configuring its heritage production for either political identity formation or economic product development, or a mix of both. The differences, I demonstrate, are caused by the differing politics of post-colonial identity and economic development involving the three cities.

Singapore's Urban Planning and Management of Enlightenment to Xiangyang

This paper describes the present situation of Singapore city planning and construction, construction experience and achievements, summarizes the successful experiences of Singapore in urban planning from three aspects of Singapore development course, operation system and characteristics of urban planning. Based on the analysis of problems in urban planning during the rapid urbanization in Xiangyang and learned from the successful experience of Singapore, it renders suggestions on countermeasures to planning study and preparation and implementation of management and supervision, urban development and historical preservation, public participation in urban planning, etc.

S7-1 House dust mite allergy and immunotherapy in tropical urban city of Singapore(Mucosal immune response in host defense system (English Session))

S7-1 House dust mite allergy and immunotherapy in tropical urban city of Singapore(Mucosal immune response in host defense system (English Session))

Social Production of Space in Johor Bahru

Debates on the social production of urban spaces have been embedded in human geography and urban sociology since the 1970s. This paper analyses and interprets how different social perceptions, constructions and ‘lived’ experiences of space contribute to urban studies in the fast-growing city of Johor Bahru, under Iskandar Malaysia, that is regarded as the dual city of Singapore. This is addressed through the investigation of urban transformation in the city centre, field observations and interviews with developers in Iskandar Malaysia and inhabitants in an urban kampong (village) located in the expanded metropolitan area. The paper also discusses the Malaysian capitalist modernisation manifested in urban redevelopment that drives socio-spatial transformation and results in the decline of the old centre and massive suburban sprawl, while reinforcing the cultural hegemony of spaces by the dominant socioeconomic class and ethnic groups.

The Suppressed in the Modern Urbanscape: Cultural Difference and Film in Singapore

The Singapore People's Action Party (PAP) state's adapted Euro-US modernist impulses were reflected not in high cultural achievements but in building construction. Since independence, the PAP has revamped Singapore's colonial downtown into a conceptually empty postnational space filled with decontextualized buildings designed by famous foreign architects. While this uniformly high-rise environment and urban development is common among the high-economic-growth East and Southeast Asia countries since the 1980s, one difference in Singapore's urbanism is a utopian belief that once existed in the advanced West — that rational design will make rational societies without superfluousness. The commercial downtown and successful public housing jointly become the embodiment of a uniform urban space of physical perfectibility. An important part of the emergence of Singapore contemporary art practices has been the exploration in 1990s independent film of the suppressed nonelite subjectivities in public housing. Some filmmakers took public housing to be a space separate from the commercial downtown, and they suggested that this space represents an ambivalent site of modernity in its relationship to increasingly elitist capitalist development—they constitute a geography that indicates sociocultural difference. The filmmakers, in attempting to map an urban space capable of yielding knowledge of nonelite people, also attempt to delineate the interiority of a major part of Singapore's city space, given that 80 percent of the population lives in public housing. The films inscribe city space by depicting the ordinary and the potentially tragic cultural meanings that are emitted from this place. They represent an interest in depictions of class, though not in class-based politics. Such films also mark the imaginative disappearance of a colonial “tropical” city for an urban world now thoroughly modernized. The representative films undertaking explorations of class and the urban environment that form the focus of this article are Eric Khoo's Mee Pok Man (1995), Kelvin Tong and Jasmine Ng's Eating Air: A Motorcycle Kungfu Love Story (1999), and Royston Tan's 15 (2002). The filmmakers accept the “arrival” of the extended public-housing cityscape as a fait accompli and an iconic marker of Singaporean identity. However, they also look at public housing as locales where utopian impulses foster dystopic places that possess diverse cultures under erasure or suppression, and in which there is no past, only endlessly present space. Critical independent film, like much of the contemporary film since the 1980s, displays dissatisfaction with the stifling enclosure of a quasi-authoritarian late modernity, and from which a thematized break is longed for. This essay examines the similar and contrasting means by which three filmmakers present the city-state as a palimpsest of suppressed urban cultures.

Antecedents for the Adoption of New Technology in Emerging Wireless Cities: Comparisons between Singapore and Taipei

Hu M.-C. Antecedents for the adoption of new technology in emerging wireless cities: comparisons between Singapore and Taipei, Regional Studies. This study examines the direct and indirect antecedents for the adoption of new technology in the emerging wireless cities of Singapore and Taipei (Taiwan). The results show that the development of Taipei wireless city relies on external factors that arise from top-down government policy and business strategies, whereas in the case of Singapore, it depends more on the internal factors and the market-driven participation of customers in particular. Policy-makers should give particular consideration to the divergent institutional environments that induce different types of expansion and varying degrees of efficacy in the adoption of new technology.

Superior survival in children with rhabdomyosarcoma treated as per IRSG compared to as per SIOP regimen.

e20003 Background: Rhabdomyosarcoma (RMS) constitutes nearly 4% of all children diagnosed with cancer in ethnically diverse small island city of Singapore (pop. 5 million). Methods: We compared 56 children with RMS from April 1993 to December 2010 from KK Women’s and Children’s Hospital and National University Hospital, Singapore. They were treated as per Intergroup Rhabdomyosarcoma Study Group (IRSG) regimen (n=25), Société Internationale Pediatrique D’Oncologie (SIOP) regimen (n=20), and various other regimens (n=11). Results: Median age of diagnosis was 6.3 (0.1 - 17.3 years) with a median follow-up of 2.5 (0 - 15.6 years). According to IRSG classification, there were 19 (35.1%) with low risk (LR), 21 (38.8%) with intermediate risk (IR) and 14 (25.9%) with high risk (HR) disease. Fifteen (26.8%) were alveolar subtype, 23 (41.1%) were embryonal and sub-classification was not available in 18. The primary sites of tumor were: head and neck (n=22); genitourinary (n=19); extremity (n=10); and abdomen (n=5). At the time of analysis, 80.0% (n=45) were alive with no evidence of disease, 9 were dead of disease, and two were alive with disease. The 5-year EFS and OS for the cohort was 81.8% and 80.3% respectively. By disease risk group, 5-year EFS for LR was 93.3% [95% CI, 88.9 – 98.5], IR at 94.4% [95% CI, 90 – 99.6] and HR at 42.9% [95% CI, 41.5 – 47.7] respectively (p&lt;0.001). The 5-year EFS for risk group by chemotherapy received per SIOP vs. per IRSG revealed: LR- 100% vs. 90.0% (p=0.43); IR- 100% vs. 90.9% (p=0.40); HR- 0% vs. 57.1% (0.64) respectively. Of 16 (7= HR) relapses at median of 2 years, 4 of 4 treated as per SIOP regimen were dead of disease and 2 of 3 treated as per IRSG were alive at last follow-up. Conclusions: High risk disease treated as per IRSG regimen resulted in superior EFS and OS than per SIOP. Although relapsed disease can be salvaged after initial therapy using SIOP regimen, emotional and financial impact of disease relapse on the family is vast. It would be of interest to report whether our findings can be duplicated in a collaborative international study.

Managing Water Quality in Gardens by the Bay

The Gardens by the Bay, a visionary cluster of three distinctive waterfront gardens in the heart of the city of Singapore, epitomizes the nation’s vision of ultimately being a city in a garden. Covering 101 hectares (249.57 acres) of land at Marina Bay, the site is comprised of the Gardens at Marina South (Bay South), Gardens at Marina East (Bay East) and Gardens at Marina Centre (Bay Central). When complete, the gardens will capture the essence of Singapore as a premier tropical garden city with an ideal environment in which to live and work, showcasing the application of cutting-edge innovations in environmentally friendly technology, sustainable natural resource management internationally. Bay South is located in the heart of Singapore’s new downtown. With an area of 54 hectares (133.43 acres), it incorporates two conservatories covering around 2.5 hectares (6.17 acres); steel ’SuperTree‘ structures that are 30 to 50 meters (98.42 to 164.04 feet) tall and clad with vertical green and floral displays; a series of theme gardens; open green spaces; a network of paved areas and a lake system. The lake system is about five hectares

Urban informality and everyday (night)life: a field study in Singapore

In recent years, cities at the cusps of postmodernism and cosmopolitanism have begun to recognise the social and economic gains generated by urban nightlife in terms of employment, tourism and civic boosterism. One would therefore expect to see from the 'contemporisation', commodification and control of urban nightlife a gradual demise of urban informality on the city streets at night. Taking the global city of Singapore as a departure point for our investigation, we argue that spatial and temporal urban modes of informal practices are not only alive and well but also co-exist alongside the formal night-time economy. Adopting a three-fold ethnographic approach that combines the research methods of flânerie, photography and narration, this field study uncovers everyday (night)life as it unfolds in the Bangladeshi ethnic quarter of Singapore's Little India. In so doing, this paper contributes to wider understandings of urban informality by revealing the significance of informal urban nightscapes on the ever...

Special Ecology Feature: Biodiversity's Crucial Role in the Modern Singapore City

Special Ecology Feature: Biodiversity's Crucial Role in the Modern Singapore City

The Queer Time of Creative Urbanism: Family, Futurity, and Global City Singapore

Singapore's rise as a ‘global city’ has attracted much scholarly attention, especially as its government has recently turned to ‘creative city’ strategies. In line with critiques made of other global and creative cities around the world, important critiques have been leveled that the city-state's developmental efforts are bureaucratic, hierarchical, narrowly economistic, and, most importantly, socially polarizing. This paper demonstrates that Singapore's global/creative city project is also heteronormative and, further, that this heteronormative logic is tied in fundamental ways to broad forms of social polarization. The drive to attract ‘foreign talent’ to the city-state as a key prong in attaining future economic growth has resulted in significant changes in sexual citizenship over the last decade. Efforts to shake off an authoritarian image and foster a creative economy have led to the liberalization of the government's approach to public expressions of homosexuality. Yet discriminatory legislation and policy that excludes gays and lesbians from full citizenship has been maintained. Further, Singapore maintains a bifurcated migration regime that invites ‘foreign talent’ and their families to become part of the national family through naturalization, while ‘foreign workers’ have no route to future citizenship and are prohibited from bringing dependents with them, as well as from marrying and/or having children locally. Through a coercive politics of constrained im/mobility, this alien surplus labour force is set on an alternative developmental path that precludes intimacy, love, and familial connection. Building on recent work on the notion of ‘queer time’, this paper calls attention to the ways in which the city-state's developmental aims are underpinned by an exclusionary notion of reproductive futurity, and argues that a queer theoretical approach adds much to critical efforts to undermine the Singapore government's illiberal politics of pragmatism.

Tracks in the City: Technology, mobility and society in colonial Rangoon and Singapore

AbstractAround the turn of the twentieth century, electric tramways made their appearance in the cities of Asia, but despite being a universal technology, and despite the considerable impact they had upon life in these cities, the history of tramways in Asia has hardly ever been studied. Trams, wherever they ran, mobilized the urban population to a degree unseen before—their track network could restructure the urban topography and re-evaluate its segments, as independent villages became suburbs and residential quarters rose or fell in status, and add to the segregation of workplaces and residential areas. The two cities of Singapore and Rangoon, which have been selected because of their comparability, provide two contrasting examples of how trams functioned and eventually failed in an Asian urban environment.

Affective dimensions of odor perception: A comparison between Swiss, British, and Singaporean populations.

Do affective responses to odors vary as a function of culture? To address this question, we developed two self-report scales in the United Kingdom (Liverpool: LEOS) and in Singapore (city of Singapore: SEOS), following the same procedure as used in the past to develop the Geneva Emotion and Odor Scale (GEOS: Chrea, Grandjean, Delplanque et al., 2009). The final scales were obtained by a three-step reduction of an initial pool of 480 affective terms, retaining only the most relevant terms to describe odor-related subjective affective states and comprised of six (GEOS) or seven affective dimensions (LEOS and SEOS). These included dimensions that were common to the three cultures (Disgust, Happiness Well-being, Sensuality Desire, and Energy), common to the two European samples (Soothing Peacefulness), and dimensions that were culture specific (Sensory Pleasure in Geneva; Nostalgia and Hunger Thirst in Liverpool; Intellectual Stimulation, Spirituality, and Negative Feelings in Singapore). A comparative approach showed that the dimensional organization of odor-related affective terms in a given culture better explained data variability for that culture than data variability for the other cultures, thus highlighting the importance of culture-specific tools in the investigation of odor-related affect.

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The influence of climate variables on dengue in Singapore

In this work we correlated dengue cases with climatic variables for the city of Singapore. This was done through a Poisson Regression Model (PRM) that considers dengue cases as the dependent variable and the climatic variables (rainfall, maximum and minimum temperature and relative humidity) as independent variables. We also used Principal Components Analysis (PCA) to choose the variables that influence in the increase of the number of dengue cases in Singapore, where PC1 (Principal component 1) is represented by temperature and rainfall and PC2 (Principal component 2) is represented by relative humidity. We calculated the probability of occurrence of new cases of dengue and the relative risk of occurrence of dengue cases influenced by climatic variable. The months from July to September showed the highest probabilities of the occurrence of new cases of the disease throughout the year. This was based on an analysis of time series of maximum and minimum temperature. An interesting result was that for every 2–10°C of variation of the maximum temperature, there was an average increase of 22.2–184.6% in the number of dengue cases. For the minimum temperature, we observed that for the same variation, there was an average increase of 26.1–230.3% in the number of the dengue cases from April to August. The precipitation and the relative humidity, after analysis of correlation, were discarded in the use of Poisson Regression Model because they did not present good correlation with the dengue cases. Additionally, the relative risk of the occurrence of the cases of the disease under the influence of the variation of temperature was from 1.2–2.8 for maximum temperature and increased from 1.3–3.3 for minimum temperature. Therefore, the variable temperature (maximum and minimum) was the best predictor for the increased number of dengue cases in Singapore.

Economic returns to energy-efficient investments in the housing market: Evidence from Singapore

Since January of 2005, 250 building projects in the City of Singapore have been awarded the Green Mark for energy efficiency and sustainability. This paper analyzes the private returns to these investments, evaluating the premium in asset values they command in the market. We analyze almost 37,000 transactions in the Singapore housing market to estimate the economic impact of the Green Mark program on Singapore's residential sector.We adopt a two-stage research design; in the first stage, a hedonic pricing model is estimated based on transactions involving green and non-green residential units in 697 individual projects or estates. In the second stage, the fixed effects estimated for each project are regressed on the location attributes of the projects, as well as control variables for a Green Mark rating. Our results suggest that the economic returns to green building are substantial.This is one of the first analyses of the economics of green building in the residential sector, and the only one analyzing property markets in Asia. Our results provide insight about the operation of the housing market in one country, but the policy implications about the economic returns to sustainable investments in the property market may have broader applications for emerging markets in Asia.