SMT201 AY2019-20G1 EX2 Ong Sin Kai Brendan

The Task

In this exercise, you are tasked to identify a location suitable for building a national Communicable Disease Quarantine Centre. The selected site must be located at Gombak planning subzone, with a contiguous area of at least 10,000m2 and it must meet the following decision factors:

• Economic factor: The selected site should avoid steep slope. This is because construction at steep slope tends to involve a lot of cut-and-fill and will lend to relatively higher development cost.
• Accessibility factor: The selected site should be close to existing local roads, namely: service roads and tracks. This is to ensure easy transportation of building materials during the construction stage.
• Health risk factor: The selected site should be away from population i.e. housing areas and offices in order to avoid disease spreading to the nearby population.
• Natural conservation factor: The selected site should be away from forested land, park and water.

Gombak Study Area

Accessibility (Roads): From a glance, we can see that the road network is much denser in the east region as compared to others. This is important as the new site location needs to be close to existing roads to ensure easy transportation of building materials. As such, it might be good to set up the site closer to the east region. The service roads are indicated with a straight black line and the tracks with a black dashed line for easy differentiation.

Health Risk (Building):The following areas were identified to have no impact on the location site selection, namely the clinic, garage and construction. A look through the dataset shows that most of the type of buildings were left empty. Hence, I assumed that those that were empty would fall under the residential areas. We can also see that the southern part of Gombak is void of residential buildings, making it a consideration for site selection as it must be away from the residential areas for health-related reasons.

Natural Conservation (Natural Features): We can see that most of the natural features fall in other regions except the south. As the site has to be away from the forest, parks and water, the southern part of Gombak would be a place to consider for the new building.

Economic (Elevation):We can see from the map that the Gombak has high elevation mostly in the southern area. As there is a need to avoid steep slopes for cost related reasons, it might not be viable to build the site in the southern area.