Construction platforms for Asia: thoughts on the DfMA journey in Asia-Pacific

But they don’t have to be.

Leaders and regimes will come and go, but this matrix of positive intent and action is what will truly drive the next 50 years..The third reason for hope came to me in maybe the most unexpected place: a two-hour stand in the toilet on a train with five others, due to huge overcrowding.

Of course, there was griping, anger, and frustration about the situation.There was also a humble reflection that our plight was nothing like those stuck in conflict and humanitarian disasters.What struck me most, though, was the very human and humane way people came together - caring about those wishing to catch their flight to New York, caring about one of the passengers who started to feel ill, finding space where there seemed to be none; and the humour, sharing stories, and keeping each other’s spirits up.. My sense is that we can always see the future as dark and full of threat.

It can feel like walking into a cave, where, given the darkness, our imagination takes over to ready us for all the potential threats.We listen for the fall of rocks, we see flashes of images that may or may not be there, we feel the air around us, and we search for odours which could point to pending doom.

Indigenous Americans used to describe each of these fears as friends who helped us to stay safe.

The fear of falling is a friend who reminds you to stay away from the edge and to keep hold of something.There’s been a real consistency to their approach and they have continued to focus their spending power to promote Modern Methods of Construction.

Moreover, the Infrastructure Projects Authority (IPA) who, to some extent, hold the purse strings around infrastructure spending, have also been pushing the construction Platforms agenda..In Asia, we’ve seen the Singapore government encouraging ‘Prefabricated Prefinished Volumetric Construction’ (PPVC), and we’ve also seen a focus on Modular Integrated Construction (MIC) in Hong Kong.

Both markets have geographical constraints.Singapore is very land-constrained and has limited ‘internal’ modular manufacturing capacity, but imports have good access to the Malaysian and Indonesian markets.