BrazilSurbana Jurong chosen to help develop Philippines' smart city project
The Singaporean infrastructure and engineering consultancy Surbana Jurong is to play a major role in the development of the Philippines’ New Clark City project, a planned urban centre north of Manila slated to host nearly 2 million residents and workers.
The Philippine state-owned Bases Conversion and Development Authority (BCDA) has selected the Singaporean infrastructure and engineering consultancy Surbana Jurong to help develop its New Clark City project, the Philippines’ first designated ‘smart, green and disaster-resilient’ city.
Surbana Jurong has been tasked with preparing detailed design standards and guidelines for the development, which will include the refinement of the city’s urban and infrastructure design, and reviews of the long-term operation and public-private frameworks for the delivery of utilities such as water and power. The consulting firm will in addition serve as a business and financial advisor for the project.
Located roughly 100 kilometers north of Manila in North Luzon, the new, almost 10,000 hectare city is being constructed as an effort to help ease chronic congestion in the capital, which with an estimated 71,000 people crammed in per square kilometer has the greatest population density of any city in the world – well over double that of Dhaka and Mumbai.
Envisioned as a ‘destination where nature, lifestyle and business, education, and industry converge into a global city based on principles of sustainability,’ New Clark City will feature university campuses, solar farms and an industrial research & development park together with its mix of residential and office buildings, and is projected to attract over 1.1 million residents in its initial phases, along with 800,000 daily workers.
Kelly Yang, managing director of Development Management for the infrastructure firm said; “This is an important strategic partnership for Surbana Jurong and an exciting project for my team. The project will allow my team to truly demonstrate the full spectrum of our capabilities.”
Regional leader
With 13,500 employees across 120 offices in more than 40 countries, Surbana Jurong has grown over the past 50 years to become one of Asia’s largest urban planning consultancies, and was recently cited as a home-grown success by Singapore’s Ministry of Finance in its industry roadmap to boost the professional services sector in the country. The Sububan Jurong Group has tripled in size since its 2015 inception, and added Australian engineering firm Robert Bird to its recent string of acquisitions at the end of last year.
Speaking previously on the New Clark City Development, the President and CEO of Bases Conversion and Development Authority, Vivencio B. Dizon, outlined the importance of the private sector in the city’s development; “We have to plan this well and plan this right. I think the solution to planning it right is not reinventing the wheel and not trying to do this on our own… The challenge for us is to choose the right partners and the right groups to help us.”
In addition to BCDA and their partners the Japan Overseas Infrastructure Investment Corporation, Surbana Jurong will join fellow engineering firms AECOM and Nippon Koei as the master planners on the project – which is expected to eventually contribute upwards of $30 billion a year to the national economy and forms part of $180 billion infrastructural push from the government over the next six years.
