Marina Bay: local weather, transport and housing

Marina Bay is younger than most of the people in it. The land is reclaimed, filled from the 1970s onward out into what was open water off the historic waterfront, and the district was laid out on ground that did not exist when the buildings around the old harbour were designed.

The bay itself was closed in 2008. The Marina Barrage dams the channel where the Singapore and Kallang rivers reach the sea, and the effect was to convert a tidal estuary into a freshwater reservoir in the middle of the city. It does three jobs at once, which is unusual for a piece of water infrastructure: it stores drinking water, it holds the level low enough to take a storm surge off the low-lying city centre, and it keeps a constant water level in the basin, which is what makes the waterfront usable.

The trade-off is worth stating. A barrage removes the tide, and removing the tide removes the flushing that a tidal estuary does for itself, so water quality in the reservoir is a managed outcome rather than a natural one. The engineering behind that is the subject of one of the pieces on this site.