THEY are a blot on the landscape when you look out of your Housing Board flat: unsightly concrete canals carrying murky water through your estate.
But now, Singapore's deep drains will no longer be as dull as ditchwater. Under a new plan taking shape, they will make a splash as fun water parks with walkways, waterfalls and leisure boating activities.
Yep, in the quest to be a more desirable isle, Singapore is going beyond being a Garden City to being a Water World, too. And boy, are ideas to jazz up the waterways gushing forth.
Today, Life! brings you exclusive pictures of five more new projects that are in the water works to beautify the backwaters, on top of several announced earlier in the week.
These latest cool ideas will breathe new life into canals at Pasir Ris Park, Siglap, Ulu Pandan, Choa Chu Kang and Bedok.
Laguna Link: Singapore's drains are getting extreme makeovers. --PHOTO: Public Utilities Board
Kayaking trails into mangrove swamps, lush greenery to soften concrete edges and a linkway under an existing golf course are just some of the features planned for these areas in this latest phase of the Active, Beautiful, Clean (ABC) Waters masterplan launched last April. It is being carried out by the authority in charge of Singapore's waterways, the Public Utilities Board (PUB).
"We are adding the blue to our green island," Mr Yap Kheng Guan, a director at PUB, tells Life!.
The aim is to bring people closer to water so they will better appreciate this resource, he says, adding: "We hope people will be less inclined to throw rubbish into the water after they've seen how clean it can be."
The new locations on the list come just days after the PUB unveiled the first part of the programme's latest phase.
These included a plan to create two new lakes at Punggol to create both a reservoir and a nature spot.
Bishan Park Canal. --PHOTO: Public Utilities Board
And Bishan Park will no longer have the gaping maw of a concrete canal separating it from Bishan housing estate. Instead, a river will run through it - a landscaped one with footbridges and little side-streams with specially filtered water in which children can frolic safely.
Over at Alexandra Canal, the often brackish bit of the Singapore River at the back of the Zion Riverside food centre will have a park built, not beside, but actually over it. The remarkable "park" atop a canal will have gurgling water fountains using water pumped up from below.
With this, and some of the other projects, the ABC Waters programme makes the most of Singapore's limited land by creating "parks" over or in the water itself.
At Punggol, for example, a floating wetland half the size of a football field will be created in the middle of the reservoir, and will become a sanctuary for wildlife. And reserve land about 6m wide alongside drains and canals at Sungei Ulu Pandan in Clementi and Pang Sua Canal in Choa Chu Kang will be transformed with landscaping.
The latest plans come on top of projects already under way to spend $23 million upgrading the Bedok and MacRitchie reservoirs and a stretch of Kallang River in Kolam Ayer.
All the projects are set to be completed over the next five years. It is too early yet to know the total cost of the programme, says Mr Yap.
The PUB maintains the Republic's network of 14 reservoirs, 32 major rivers and more than 7,000km of canals and drains.
Helping with the landscaping part of the plan is the National Parks Board (NParks), in charge of 9,383ha of green space.
The experts from NParks will give advice on selecting the right greenery - such as choosing plants that do not shed leaves easily, so they won't clog the waterways.
And if you're worried about the effects of the recreational use on the waterways, the PUB stresses that neither the carrying capacity of the drains and canals, nor the quality of water in reservoirs, will be affected.
