Opening Address by Minister Lawrence Wong at the World Cities Summit Mayors Forum

Jul 8, 2018


A very warm welcome to Singapore and to the 9th annual World Cities Summit (WCS) Mayors Forum. Many of you have travelled from afar, and I see many familiar faces. I welcome you back to Singapore.

With your continued support, this Mayors Forum has established itself as one of the key gatherings of Mayors and city leaders in the world. In this edition today, I am very happy that we have in attendance 122 leaders from 117 cities. 

I think this shows the commitment of city leaders to learn from each other’s experiences and share best practices, and forge closer relationships for collaboration and partnership. It is important that we do so, because we all recognise that the challenges we face are common and transboundary in nature. And even as we face these common challenges, we also can see that many of the usual multi-lateral platforms for cooperation across nations are increasingly coming under pressure today. That’s why it is even more important for all of us to find new ways of working together and strengthening our cooperation, especially at the city level.

The theme of this year’s World Cities Summit is “Embracing the Future through Innovation and Collaboration”. We will be discussing two major topics in today’s forum: first, innovation and its disruptive effects; and second, infrastructure and financing of infrastructure. These are two major issues that I am sure all of you care deeply about. They are close to our hearts and I believe we will benefit from the sharing today. 

Let me first start briefly on disruption and innovation. Cities have always been the birth places of new ideas, and these new ideas can be disruptive. But that’s not always a bad thing; in fact, it is desirable to have disruptive ideas to take place within the city. Because if you liken the city to a living organism, there is never such a thing as status quo. You are either improving or you are declining, and I am sure none of us want our city to decline. So we need disruptive ideas to disrupt the status quo, to change, progress and flourish. 

We have witnessed rapid advances in technology, such as digitalisation, Big Data and Artificial Intelligence, which are all potential game-changers that enable us to reimagine and rebuild our cities. They have tremendous benefits across many aspects of city development and planning; be it in the master-planning and visualisation of a city, building greener and more sustainable cities, or in mobility where you have technologies offering new applications, or even in the delivery of services like e-payments, sensors and smart street lamps, or applications that are used for so many other services these days. 

All of these things can contribute towards building a smarter city. “Smart City” is now the buzzword in urban development, but it’s not just a slogan. It is an important organising concept to galvanise different stakeholders and harness technology effectively in building our cities.

That is why in Southeast Asia, we have recently formed an ASEAN Smart City Network (ASCN) comprising 26 cities from 10 ASEAN states. I am very happy that many of the city leaders from these 26 cities in ASEAN are here at the forum today. While all our cities may be at different stages of development, I am sure in terms of the respective technology, we face many common challenges and issues.

We hope that this network as well as the Mayors Forum at the World Cities Summit will provide a useful platform to share experiences and learn from one other. And indeed, later today, we have various Mayors and city leaders who will be sharing examples of their own cities’ experiences in dealing with, and harnessing technology and innovation. 

For example, Chief Minister Naidu will share how the Andhra Pradesh government is bringing technology and innovation to remote corners of the state, and Chief Commissioner Lucy Turnbull will speak about how the Greater Sydney Region plan is helping Sydney adapt to technological changes and mega-trends. So that’s our first topic of the day – about technology, innovation and disruptive change.

Next, we will also talk about infrastructure and infrastructure financing. In previous editions of the Forum, this has been a major topic of conversation. Many city leaders have talked about infrastructure - you have shared with us your infrastructure needs; all of us have ideas for new infrastructure solutions. But very often, we run into one common problem – getting the projects financed. 

It is a common challenge that all of us share. In fact, there are estimates that Asia alone is in need of US$52 trillion in infrastructure investments between now and 2040. Finding ways to close this infrastructure financing gap is of critical importance, and we know that governments and cities cannot do this on our own. 

We need to rethink infrastructure financing strategies. We need to pursue more public private partnerships (PPP), and structure the projects in a way that is fair, integrated, and valuable, so that we can attract private parties to finance the project.

Singapore hopes to do our part in contributing to this process. We are already a financial centre for the region. We are home to high-quality professional services, including project advisory, dispute resolution, engineering, and legal services. So, we have an ecosystem that integrates infrastructure players along and across the entire value chain – engineering companies, multi-lateral banks, private financiers, professional services. So we think we can serve as an infrastructure exchange for the region, and that is why we will be setting up an Infrastructure Asia office later this year, with the specific objective of trying to bring together more partnerships, both public and private, to catalyse and facilitate more infrastructure projects in this part of the world. 

Later this afternoon, we will also have the opportunity to hear from other cities and international organisations and private sector, on what more can be done with regard to infrastructure planning, and the financing of infrastructure projects. Mayor Aboutaleb will be sharing Rotterdam’s experience in working with different sources of infrastructure from PPP to banks and even crowd funding. So that’s Rotterdam’s experience. Mayor Shawarbeh from Amman will talk about how his city leveraged different financial sources of funding for the expansion of the city’s water treatment plant. So these are some of the Mayors who will be sharing their experiences, and we certainly look forward to hearing from other city leaders as well.

In short, developments in innovation and infrastructure offer tremendous opportunity which, if harnessed wisely, can reap tremendous benefits in enhancing the liveability and sustainability of our cities.

There will be many opportunities for everyone here to exchange your ideas and experiences today, and over the coming days of the Summit. I encourage each of you to bring your city’s own set of innovative ideas to the table, to share candidly with your fellow Mayors and city leaders, so that we can all learn from one another, and strengthen our collaboration at the city level.

On that note, I wish everyone here a very fruitful discussion. Thank you very much.