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Singapore Jurong Town Corporation
The primary responsibility for acquiring, developing,
and
managing industrial sites, however, belonged to the Jurong
Town
Corporation, established in 1968. The corporation provided
manufacturers with their choice of industrial land sites
on which
to build their own factories or ready-built factories for
the
immediate start-up of manufacturing operations. In the
1950s, when
the idea of establishing an industrial estate was first
conceived,
Jurong was an area of dense tropical forests and mangrove
swamps on
the southwestern quadrant of the island, and it was not
until 1960
that the government decided to undertake the project.
During the
first few years, entrepreneurial response was
disappointing, but
after independence the pace of development accelerated. By
1989
Jurong had quadrupled its original size, and the
corporation also
managed twenty-three other industrial estates, including
the
Singapore Science Park, a research and development park
adjacent to
the National University of Singapore. Although the
emphasis in the
1970s had been on the development of labor-intensive
industries, in
the 1980s priority was given to upgrading facilities to
make them
more attractive for the establishment of high value-added
and high
technology industries.
The industrial estates were designed to be
self-contained urban
centers and included such facilities as golf courses,
banks,
shopping centers, restaurants, child-care centers, and
parks. As of
1988, they contained some 3,600 factories employing a
total of
216,000 workers. The Jurong Town Corporation also provided
infrastructure and support facilities, including the
Jurong
Industrial Port, which was the country's main bulk cargo
gateway,
and the Jurong Marine Base, which serviced offshore
petroleum
operations.
The Jurong Town Corporation shared responsibility for
coastal
planning and development control with the Housing and
Development
Board, the Urban Renewal Authority, and the Port of
Singapore
Authority. The coastal zone, dominated by its entrepôt
facilities,
was the traditional foundation on which Singapore's
economy was
built. Between 1965 and 1987, the coastal zone was
enlarged by
about fifty square kilometers through reclamation of tidal
flats,
shallow lagoons, and wetlands. The two largest landfill
operations
were the East and the West Coast Reclamation schemes
adjoining the
Central Business District. The former was the Housing and
Development Board's largest project, in which a "sea city"
almost
the size of the present-day downtown area had been
developed by
both the private and public sector. Experts estimated that
in the
1980s Singapore, including the offshore islands, had the
potential
of increasing its existing land resources by about 10
percent.
Data as of December 1989
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