I think few people outside Singapore would be familiar with the concept of Flatted Factories, or factories in flats, and you may not even have heard then term since geography lessons in secondary school. These factories are found in clusters all around Singapore, and they form an important part of our economy.
The majority of those in land-scarce Singapore live in high-rise apartments, so it’s not surprising to find that many industries also reside in high-rise factories. Jerome blogs about the flatted factories in our landscape:
These days, Industrial Parks and Estates are very much a feature of Singapore’s landscape beyond the city, as much as the HDB public housing estates are. I guess many would not bat an eyelid at the many unremarkable high rise industrial buildings that house light industries these days which sit alongside the low rise ones. The high rise factories, referred to as flatted factories can, I suppose, be considered to be an import to Singapore during the rapid industrialisation programme that also gave us the heavy industrial estate at Jurong Industrial Estate in the early part of the 1960s.
The concept of flatted factories was not an original Singapore invention, but brought from another heavily populated island city. Where? Find out in Jerome’s post here.
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