The Agropolitan Designer

Prof Stephen Cairns, co-director of the recently launched future cities lab global, wants you to play a part in his project that incorporates urban and agricultural conditions in areas of high population densities.

- Low Shi Ping

Although based in Singapore, Prof Stephen Cairns has of late been focusing his attention on Jakarta.

The Director of Future Cities Lab Global (FCL Global) and an architecture professor, he is designing a 16-hectare agropolitan town on the edge of Indonesia’s capital that he hopes will capture the interest of architects and designers.

This pilot project is just one of several expected to come out from FCL Global, a new phase of an international, interdisciplinary research collaboration between the Singapore-ETH Centre and Swiss university ETH Zurich, that also brings together three of Singapore’s universities – National University of Singapore (NUS), Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU) and Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD).

Launched in December last year, the five-year programme involves researchers across various fields from both countries developing solutions to help cities and their surrounding regions achieve sustainable growth.

That the area of focus was decided in 2019 seemed serendipitous; FCL Global was delayed by a year due to the COVID-19 pandemic and it served to affirm they were moving in the right direction.

“We wanted to think about cities in relation to the nearby settlement systems that support them and how they are part of larger exchange systems,” explains Prof Cairns.

“COVID-19 really underlined the importance of the logic that you can’t just close the borders and be safe; your safety depends on the safety of other systems, because the world is more interdependent and interconnected now than before.”