SINGAPORE AS A SMART NATION � USING PUBLIC DATASETS TO STUDY BUILDING INFRASTRUCTURE TRENDS

Abstract

With such a small land area and ever-increasing population numbers, urban density issues will continue to place stress on Singapore’s building infrastructure and economy. In particular, the housing infrastructure in Singapore has been struggling to keep up to the surge in demand. Recognizing this challenge, the government launched the smart nation initiative to tackle these issues with the help of data and technology. The government has publicized a huge array of datasets pertaining to the country and more can be done to analyze these datasets to better understand the Singapore’s building infrastructure landscape. The first step to solving Singapore’s urban density issue is to therefore first study and understand the underlying trends and patterns from these datasets. Therefore, in this dissertation, building infrastructure related publicly available data will be studied to understand the underlying trends and patterns. These data will be collected from two public data sources and will be presented visually in graphs and charts using Tableau – a data visualization software.

In summary, the various datasets revealed that Singapore’s population is moving towards an ageing and more populated one. Demand for BTO flats have increased and both public and private housing prices have surged over the years. Results have shown that the rise in residential prices have been positively correlated to the rise in population density. This implies that Singapore’s housing prices will continue increasing in the future.

The findings from this study are limited to the datasets that are publicly available, therefore unable to give a full picture of the building infrastructure landscape in Singapore. Future research should explore more on urban mobility data as this also affects Singapore’s infrastructure.