Real Estate Realities by Ku Swee Yong

Author:Ku Swee Yong
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9789814634892
Publisher: Marshall Cavendish International

16.

Gardens in the air

21 February 2014, BT Invest Blog (www.btinvest.com.sg/blogs/)

We celebrated ‘Fifty Years of Greening Singapore’ in 2013. This is the success of the ‘City in a Garden’ vision that was kicked off by Singapore’s first prime minister, Lee Kuan Yew, in 1963.

Since then, we have progressed beyond planting trees at ground level such as along the pavements, at our home gardens and in parks. Buildings with sky gardens are now a common sight across Singapore. Within the last decade, new developments have added a lot of greenery to our skyline. If I recall correctly, commercial buildings in the city centre featuring large sky gardens were led by One Marina Boulevard (also known as NTUC Centre) and One George Street were they were completed in 2004. And after the BCA Green Mark Scheme was introduced in January 2005, many developers incorporated sky gardens in their projects as partial fulfillment towards the Green Mark assessment.

Developers welcomed and made full use of several incentives which led to further greening of our buildings. For example, up till 31 December 2008, the Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA) used to give exemptions on the Gross Floor Area (GFA) for planter boxes in order to “encourage residents living in flats and condominiums to provide some vertical greenery to help create visual relief to our high-density living environment.” With the GFA exemption, developers generously incorporated planter boxes in their projects as they can sell the extra floor space to buyers.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.