Evds2702marks’s Weblog

After our class trip to Jeld-Wen, I started thinking about other countries and how the use of doors and windows, as well as heating and cooling affects how they design.  A few years ago I spent a couple weeks in Singapore to visit a friend of a friend.  It was an incredible experience but I find my self appreciating it more each day as I am continually learning more about sustainability.  Singapore is not a very large country, it takes up very little space on the map, but it has an extremely large population density.  One of the first things I noticed as I landed in Singapore was the vast amount of tall buildings.  Since space is tight, instead of building out like we do in Canada, they build up.  As of right now, Canadians aren’t worried about space.  The amount of land located between our cities is so large that we do not have to consider running out of space as a possibility.  In Singapore, they value their land and do not waste any of it.  Great thought is put into the design and development of their city.  Unlike Winnipeg where communities like Waverley West expand across our prairies in the span of only a few months.  One thing a Singapore resident said to me that really stuck was “why do you waste so much space in Canada?”  My answer to his question was “because we can.”  If he were to ask me the same question now, I wouldn’t answer the same way.  I would actually ask the same question myself.  Yes, we do have a large amount of open land, but we aren’t thinking into the future.  Sprawl is becoming more of an issue and we have to start taking it seriously.  In Singapore, you very rarely see a single family home located on its own piece of land.  People live in large apartment buildings.  They reach stories into the sky and really tackle their space issues.  This also makes transportation easier.

Another thing I noticed in Singapore, was there methods of heating and cooling.  Although, since the country stays at a nearly constant temperature of 30 degrees celsius, heating is not really an issue.  The apartment that we stayed in was located many stories above the ground and consisted of 3 floors.  It felt more like a house than an apartment.  On one of the floors there was actually a window cut into the wall.  The neat thing about this was that there was no glass.  It was literally just a whole in the wall linking directly to the outdoors.  Because of Singapore weather conditions, such a thing is possible.  At first I thought this would be a problem with the air conditioning.  It would allow the cool air to escape and prevent the air conditioning from being as effective.  But, SIngapore has a different method of cooling than we do here in Canada.  Each room has its own individual air conditioning unit.  As you enter a room, you can turn the air conditioning on to your desired temperature.  As you leave the room, the unit can be turned off.  This eliminates the use of unneeded energy.  Since the units are so advanced, all of them can be turned off when you leave the apartment and can be turned on when you return for immediate air conditioning relief.  

Singapore is so technologically advanced compared to almost all other countries.  Why is it that such technologies have been developed, yet very few people actually take advantage of them?  This is just one of the many questions concerning sustainability.  Slowly, we will attempt to answer them.