What Australian Cities can Learn from Asia

By Asia Society-Victoria Distinguished Fellow, Mr Khoo Teng Chye, Director, NUS Cities and Practice Professor with the College of Design and Engineering at the National University of Singapore.
Melbourne is well known as one of the most liveable cities in the world. Singapore is also one of the most liveable cities in Asia. Yet, in many ways the two cities could not be more different.
They have almost the same population of around 6 million people, but Melbourne’s metropolitan area is 14 times that of Singapore. Melbourne has a compact city centre but a sprawling suburbia with many single-family homes. Singapore is polycentric with a CBD, many regional centres and 24 towns, which are almost all high-density, high-rise flats.
In both, affordable housing is a key challenge, but again they differ greatly in their approaches to tackling the issue. Can the two cities learn from each other? More broadly, what can Asia-Pacific cities learn from each other?
Affordable housing is a crucial issue even as cities try to become more liveable, sustainable and resilient. Australia is already one of the most urbanised nations, whereas Asia is still rapidly urbanising, especially in South and Southeast Asia. As rural residents migrate to the cities, they become ever more densely populated, and housing becomes a central concern.
Singapore has gone a long way towards addressing the issue. It has a decades-long process of integrated planning and governance, taking a holistic, systems approach that relies less on private markets than public policy.
The island nation was a sprawling, slum ridden, congested and polluted city of less than 2 million people in the early 1960s. At the time, transformation was only possible via large-scale land acquisition, putting in place urban infrastructure like roads and mass transit, sewerage and water systems, electricity and a strategic urban plan. In fact, the plan was drawn up with UN advice and managed by an Australian consultant.
This large-scale urban development project saw the creation of good quality, affordable high-rise new towns. These new towns were not ghettos, but socially inclusive places with a mix of middle- and low-income households of all ethnicities, connected to workplaces by public transport, and self-contained with community facilities like schools, hospitals and parks. Today 80% of Singaporeans live in these highly subsidised Housing & Development Board (HDB) flats.
A complex mix of policies and programmes have made this possible. These include the ability to use a significant chunk of compulsory personal savings to pay for mortgages. Towns are planned with a good social mix of varying income types and ethnicities. They are well-maintained, and there are regular renovation programmes to refresh and upgrade the flats and neighbourhoods. No HDB town looks old and tired; even the oldest neighbourhoods are colourful, bright, clean and safe, often with lots of natural shade, lush greenery and children’s playgrounds.
These have helped maintain the attractiveness of living in these towns as lifestyles have changed over the decades, whilst retaining the value of these flats as a source of wealth as people retire.
It is largely considered one of the most successful housing programmes in the world. Yet the challenge now is in sustaining this approach, given necessarily transformed attitudes in terms of sustainable materials, increasingly diverse lifestyles and ageing populations, and questions emerging as the first wave of housing approaches the tail-end of their 99 year leases. This will require continuous policy tweaking as social, economic and environmental circumstances evolve.
Addressing these challenges, HDB remains focussed on creating sustainable towns, constantly adapting their models; for instance, by creating new models of housing, such as short-leased, assisted-living small flats for elderly Singaporeans. These adaptations are pursued in the context of the climate crisis, as Singapore aims for net zero by 2050 with its Green Plan, and supporting initiatives strive for a green economy, and aim to be a city in nature and car-lite city, enabling 20-minute towns. One of these is the Active, Beautiful and Clean (ABC) Waters programme, where Singapore learnt much from Australia’s water sensitive urban design principles.
Melbourne has also grown much since I lived here for four years as a student in Monash University in the 1970s. It has a wonderful and lively CBD, with its famed laneways, fantastic food scene, and high-density street life, surrounded by delightful, walkable, and green inner suburbs. Here, people enjoy a very high quality of life.
Yet, access to housing is increasingly an issue, especially among young people. Australia’s heavily privatised housing market, with expensive rents and mortgages, means that affordable options are low-density single-storey detached houses, almost exclusively in new suburbs and growth areas towards the edge of the city, which require lengthy commutes to workplaces in the various ‘activity centres’, locking in car-dependency. All these running costs add up for individuals and governments, and a sustainable urban design remains largely out of reach.
Melbourne does benefit from strong planning in certain ways, just like Singapore, but its housing development is left largely in the hands of the private sector. Monash University convened a Commission, of which I was a member, to explore how Melbourne could push further towards a polycentric city model of new centres like the new Clayton station being planned at Monash. The Suburban Rail Loop that connects stations like Box Hill, Glen Waverley and Clayton as a circumferential line will create opportunities for new high or medium density hubs that could include high rise apartments and townhouses.
Plans from the Victorian State Government and Melbourne City Council are placing significant emphasis on creating affordable housing through changes in planning regulation, building regulations, and housing support, among other initiatives. Equally, community-led developers like Nightingale Housing and Assemble Communities are building high-quality, highly liveable, yet often affordable and mixed-tenure dwellings, at the core of their medium-density neighbourhoods. Yet, comparing the provision of public housing in both cities — around 80% in Singapore, if HDB is considered public; around 2.9% in Victoria — we can see a stark difference in approaches.
How can cities like Singapore, Melbourne and others in Asia-Pacific region share and learn how to tackle the challenges of affordable urban housing?
Platforms like my previous centre, the Centre for Liveable Cities (CLC) , the Urban Land Institute (ULI), Asia Society and our universities can contribute much to the discourse and provide thought leadership for policymakers. The National University of Singapore has its NUS Cities and other research centres. Likewise, Monash has its Sustainability Institute and Centre for Water Sensitive Cites, while Melbourne has its Centre for Cities and RMIT is leading in catalysing impactful interdisciplinary research which cities need.
The CLC has written detailed case studies on Singapore and other cities like Seoul and Shanghai that delve deep into how each city tackles their affordable housing issues. It has also distilled the principles into a Liveability Framework, which can be universally applied. With a wider lens, the ULI has identified attainable housing as one of its mission priorities. It has set up an Asia-Pacific centre for hosting and published the first comprehensive housing attainability survey for the region.
Government systems and urban development, especially across a diverse Asia-Pacific region, are very different from each other. But the challenges of affordable housing, especially with sustainability challenges like climate change and ageing populations, are very often similar—or at least translatable and transferable.
Singapore might also be able to learn from Melbourne on how to integrate the private and community sectors more effectively, as well as from its various senior housing models. Likewise, Melbourne might adapt some of the more systemic public policy and urban planning approaches that Singapore has adopted. Both cities have much to offer and learn from other cities that are either developed or still developing.
Mr Khoo Teng Chye is the fifth and current Asia Society-Victoria Distinguished Fellow, appointed in July 2024.