MORPHOLOGICAL AND PHYSIOLOGICAL ANALYSIS FOR MEASURING URBAN ENVIRONMENTAL PERFORMANCE : A CASE STUDY OF BUKIT PANJANG

Abstract

Over the past few decades the term ‘sustainability’ has been given enormous momentum for ensuring a vigorous living condition for the future generation which mostly has been concentrated on the economic freedom and social equity leaving ‘environment’ apart, another important issue of sustainability. This environment is being jeopardized with the pace of constant increasing rate of urbanization, giving birth to the multiple environmental issues ranged from local like ‘urban heat island’ to global as ‘global climate change or global warming’. Policymakers, city planners and designers therefore have recent given their deep attention to sustainable urbanization or urban form which starts with individual buildings and deals up to city scale. For planning and subsequent designing of a sustainable urban form require a finer scale environmental performance analysis of what already built. Urban environment depends on the shape and organization of spaces (morphology) on one side as well as on the physical resource management and flow (physical process) within the built environment on the other hand which are mainly anthropogenic modifications of the arrangements and orientations of the environment. So a multiple set of indicators are needed for an effective analysis of existing environment to guide planning and designing of a potential urban area. Modern geographic information technologies like GIS, remote sensing with diverse statistical tools like MS Excel, SPSS, SAS, STATA have made it easy to a large extent to reach a multiple objected decision making regarding urban environment. In this study, an environmental performance analysis has been performed based on multiple morphological and physiological indicators for Bukit Panjang, a new town of Singapore. Though Singapore government is much vigilant in urban planning in terms of ecological and green coverage perspectives, how the morphological properties like building density (plot ratio), subdivision of land parcels, urban grain sizes and level of accessibility of land parcel are correlated with the physiological process like material intensity and electricity use is still unexplored. In this research an effort has been made to make up the previous study gap or the author hopes at least that the study approach will pave a nice way for future further research in urban environmental performance analysis towards sustainable urban form.