Rejuvenate! investigates Singapore’s long-standing desire to become a City in Nature amidst growing ideas of industrial ecology, heightened concerns about biodiversity conservation, and constant urban redevelopment. The final design proposal elucidates the potential of new generation industrial factories to become a blue-green integrated environment.

Sungei Kadut Industrial Estate, a manufacturing zone located at the Northern tip of Singapore, has become a carcass of concrete and steel after decades of a sole focus on productivity and economic output. What was once a thriving estuary has now been degraded into a hardened lifeless landscape. Such is a common trajectory of industrial estates around the once ecologically vibrant periphery of Singapore. Now, an opportunity to reverse such ecological degradation has arrived. New investments are poured into industrial estates in light of the nation’s vision of becoming a City in Nature and the burgeoning idea of Industrial Ecology.

Mirroring Industrial Ecology’s material focus, Rejuvenate! casts water in a similar light. Water is proposed to be seen as an agent of rejuvenation that flows through both man-made and natural systems. Hence, new generation industrial factories are designed as kits-of-parts that maximise water collection, nature-based water treatment, and reuse water for industrial purposes. This set-up of a district-scale localised and circular water system aims to construct new saltwater and freshwater ecosystems and vibrant waterfront for people.