Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA)

Their Mission

"To plan and facilitate the physical development of Singapore into a tropical city of excellence."

Their Role

The Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA) is Singapore's national planning authority. It is a statutory board under the Ministry of National Development. This Ministry is responsible for Singapore's physical development through long-term landuse planning, public housing, public works, urban redevelopment, parks and recreation and other aspects of the physical development of Singapore.

URA has a crucial role in planning the nation's future. It prepares long-range, as well as more detailed, local area plans for physical development and then co-ordinates and guides efforts to bring these plans to reality.

The URA People And Organisation

The URA has about 1,200 staff performing diverse professional and administrative, technical and supportive roles in the organisation.

Human Resource

URA is committed to human resource development, ensuring high levels of skill, efficiency and productivity. A comprehensive training and education plan offers ample development opportunities for all staff, like core and functional skills training, postgraduate and undergraduate study and other formal education programmes. Staff recreation and welfare needs are amply catered for by in-house recreational and sports facilities. Leisure and sports activities are organised year round to promote a healthy lifestyle.

Productivity and Service Excellence

Building a successful organisation requires the involvement and commitment of all staff to improve work practices, increase efficiency and improve customer service. All URA staff members are in Work Improvement Teams (WITs) and help to contribute ideas for improvement through the Staff Suggestion Scheme (SSS).

URA’s organisation strategy towards service excellence is to be:

• Service-Oriented - Responsive, Reliable, Helpful, Fair
• Efficient - Productive, Cost Conscious
• Professional - Forward-looking, Creative, Source of New Ideas, High Standards, Respected as Planning Authority

Finance

URA is a self-financing organisation. Our operating income is generated from development control charges, agency and consultation fees - including commissions for acting as the government's agent for the sale of sites programme.

Information Technology

URA is proactive in exploiting information technology to increase productivity and provide better customer service. URA has put in place a reliable and secured network and system infrastructure using open architecture, client server, and ATM technology. TheirInformation Systems department has been awarded ISO9001 for Specification, Design, Development, Testing, Implementation, and Support of Application system.

URA has also developed various computer systems to improve productivity. For example, the Integrated Land Use System (ILUS) uses state-of-the-art Geographic Information System (GIS) technology to integrate all land use information for easy retrieval in processing development applications.

Further more, URA is also actively working on e-commerce and on-line applications to improve services to the public. The Electronic Development Application (EDA), a key system they developed, uses the latest e-commerce infrastructure (Singapore One) to allow architects, developers and public to submit secured electronic applications using the Public-Key Infrastructures (PKIs) for planning approval. This has resulted in faster processing time and better services.