Allen works as the VP of Design, Planning and Economics for Aecom. Currently, he is heading up a housing township project in Singapore which will eventually boast 56,000 housing units. He discusses his role in a project of that magnitude.
Transcript
>> My name is Alan Folks [phonetic spelling], and I'm a Vice President of AECOM, which is a design planning and engineering firm based in Los Angles, but I work out of Singapore. The job as the director of design for our operations in Singapore, so I run the office of about 65 people; 30 of those are landscape architects, 20 of them are urban designers and about 10 or so are economists, and we do projects in Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Vietnam; all throughout Southeast Asia. A typical project would be fairly large, right now we're just starting a new project in Singapore for a new housing township, and it's about 1,800 acres in size. It-- ultimately when it is built out in about ten years from now it will include 56,000 housing units, and a lot of job generating space and huge parks in open spaces, to underground subway line, aboveground NLRT line, and lots of different kinds of uses that you can find in a normal city. We typically partner with the clients to find out what their needs are, but then as part of this large team there has to be a transportation engineer involved, there's civil engineers involved, there's economists, there's biologists looking at the you know the site for us. Any number of disciplines that have to come together to solve a fairly complex problem of how you house all these people in one location. So it's a-- I call it a multi disciplinary effort that would only succeed if we are all working together and trying to get this done.
Download transcript