About this Event
Singapore has spent more than two decades greening its built environment. At the heart of this transition is the Building and Construction Authority's (BCA) Green Mark scheme, introduced in 2005 and progressively strengthened as Singapore moves towards increasingly ambitious targets for energy efficiency and decarbonisation. Yet, the transformation of Singapore's built environment is about more than technological advancement. Behind every green building lie communities of people and organisations whose relationships, capabilities and decisions shape what gets built, how it is built and how it is used. At the same time, the drive towards higher environmental performance raises difficult questions about the future of our existing buildings and the cultural, historical and social values they embody.
What is the social and cultural cost of the green transition of Singapore's built environment? What should be preserved, who gets to participate, and what trade-offs are we prepared to make along the way?
The Social Architecture of Climate Policy brings together perspectives from sociology, heritage conservation, environmental design and computational research to explore the opportunities, tensions and less visible consequences of Singapore's green-building transition.
Dr. Benjamin Low (SUTD; NTU Climate Transformation Programme), Ronald C.T. Lim (Docomomo Singapore), Jihane El Alami (GreenA Consultants) and Daniel Wong (SUTD) come together to examine Singapore’s green-building transition through technical, economic, relational and cultural lenses. Drawing on research into the Green Mark collaboration network, the heritage value of modernist landmarks such as Golden Mile Tower and People’s Park Complex, the practical challenges of greening buildings like National Gallery Singapore, and the potential of AI-enabled performance analysis, the session asks when we should renew and when we should rebuild. Together, the speakers will consider how increasingly measurable environmental standards can be balanced against cultural continuity, architectural diversity and opportunities for new firms. This session will be moderated by Prof. Thomas Schroepfer (Architecture and Sustainable Design, SUTD; Director, FCL Global, Singapore-ETH Centre; NTU Climate Transformation Programme).
Bringing together research, conservation advocacy, environmental practice and computational thinking, this lecture invites audiences to consider a broader understanding of sustainability: one concerned not only with how efficiently buildings perform, but also with the relationships, histories, communities and forms of value that Singapore chooses to carry into a climate-resilient future.
Tuesday Lecture
24 November 2026, 6:30pm – 8:30pm
The Hall, NTU CCA, Blk 6 Lock Road, #01-10 Gillman Barracks, Singapore 108934
The Climate Transformation: Sustainable Societies Series is organised by members of the Climate Transformation Programme (CTP) Cross-Cutting Theme 1: Sustainable Societies research team.
Sustainable Societies
Principal Investigator, Associate Professor Laura Miotto (NTU ADM)
Principal Investigator, Professor Dr Thomas Schroepfer (SUTD)
Principal Investigator, Assistant Professor Dr Ella Raidel (NTU ADM)
Research Fellow Dr Joshua Gebert (NTU ADM)
This Lecture Series is supported by the Singapore Ministry of Education Academic Research Fund Tier 3 grant [MOE-MOET32022-0006] for the Climate Transformation Programme.
---------
Speakers
Dr. Benjamin Low, SUTD-housed research fellow working with the NTU-based Climate Transformation Programme, will begin by presenting findings from his research, The Social Architecture of Climate Policy: Network Structure and Equity in Singapore's Green Building Ecosystem. Drawing on Green Mark participation data from 2005 to 2025, the study reconstructs the collaboration network of developers, architects and built-environment consultants involved in Green Mark-certified projects. His findings point towards a relational form of cumulative advantage — a “Matthew effect” in which firms that entered the ecosystem early and accumulated experience, reputation and collaborative relationships subsequently became increasingly well positioned to participate in later Green Mark projects. His presentation explores how Singapore might balance the reliability and accumulated expertise of established firms against the need to preserve opportunities for new organisations, approaches and forms of innovation to enter the ecosystem. As Green Mark becomes increasingly demanding and widespread, who gets to participate in the green-building industry and what might be lost if its delivery becomes increasingly concentrated?
Ar. Ronald C. T. Lim, representing Docomomo Singapore, will touch on the intangible dimensions of sustainability. Drawing on Docomomo SG's advocacy for Singapore's modern built heritage — including iconic landmarks like People's Park Complex — he will examine the intangible cultural and social memory embedded in these decades-old structures. He will identify the lost opportunities and losses incurred when society and the body politic make one-dimensional judgments on a building's utility to justify its demolition and replacement. His contribution invites us to reflect on the unintuitive yet inherent synergies between low-embodied-carbon adaptive reuse and preserving collective memory through the stewardship of pre-existing built heritage and social ecologies. Could heritage conservation and adaptive reuse be the overlooked leverage point that accelerates our built environment's sustainability agenda?
Jihane El Alami, representing GreenA Consultants, will bring the discussion into the realities of professional practice. Drawing on GreenA's experience in sustainable design, decarbonisation and Green Mark consultancy, she will reflect on what it takes to improve the environmental performance of existing buildings when sustainability is only one of several values that must be considered. Drawing on GreenA's project experience, her presentation will examine the technological, operational and collaborative challenges involved in greening existing buildings while responding to their social, cultural and historical significance through reflecting on case studies such as National Gallery Singapore. How do practitioners negotiate environmental ambition when they cannot simply destroy and rebuild?
Daniel Wong, doctoral candidate at SUTD's Architecture and Sustainable Design pillar, will turn the discussion towards the future of the regenerative city. Drawing on his doctoral research on Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) and artificial intelligence, he will explore how emerging computational technologies could make building-performance analysis more accessible while enabling more integrated approaches to evaluating the built environment — approaches that could potentially level the playing field for firms and policymakers looking to refine their decision-making and design processes. His presentation will consider the potential for AI-enabled frameworks to bring environmental, spatial, social and cultural information into conversation with one another, while recognising that questions of cultural and social value cannot simply be reduced to another numerical score. Can emerging analytical tools help practitioners and policymakers recognise dimensions of sustainability that conventional building-performance frameworks struggle to capture?
Moderator
Thomas Schroepfer is Full Professor and Founding Programme Director of Architecture and Sustainable Design (ASD) at the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD). He is the Director of the Singapore-ETH Centre Future Cities Laboratory (FCL), based at Singapore’s Campus for Research Excellence and Technological Enterprise (CREATE), where he leads pioneering research at the intersection of architecture, urban design, and technology. He is also the Director of SUTD’s Advanced Architecture Laboratory and a Senior Fellow at the Collegium Helveticum, the Institute for Advanced Studies of ETH Zurich (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich), where he contributes to interdisciplinary research on the future of cities. Schroepfer has held visiting professorships at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH Zurich), Loughborough University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL), and the National University of Singapore (NUS), shaping global conversations on sustainable urban development and design innovation.
---------
About the Climate Transformation: Sustainable Societies Lecture Series
The series returns for its third cycle in the Academic Year 2026-27. Each session features researchers from the Climate Transformation Programme, alongside contributors from other academic fields, as well as artists, architects and advocates.
Event venue & nearby stays
NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore, Block 6 Lock Road #01-09/10, Queenstown, Singapore
Concerts, fests, parties, meetups — all the happenings, one place.