The 45-Minute Standard: Making Southeast Asia’s Industrial Parks Efficient and Liveable

Industrial parks are usually judged by hectares zoned, dollars committed and containers shipped, rarely by how long a worker spends getting from the factory gate to a clinic, school or home. That omission matters, because the second set of considerations increasingly determines the first.

Call it the 45-minute industrial park: a zone where workers’ housing, everyday services and the park’s supplier and logistics networks are all reachable within roughly 45 minutes. This would be the industrial cousin of Carlos Moreno‘s “15-minute city“, scaled up to factories, ports and freight. As the region competes for relocations, the parks with lasting advantages will be those embedded in local cities, industrial networks and social structures.

The industrial park is a designated area where a government concentrates infrastructure, simplified regulation and incentives that firms could never assemble alone. These remarkable policy instruments are variously labelled — special economic zone, export processing zone, science park — but are essentially the same. Designing parks based on a “45-minute” rule could foster greater connectivity suited to today’s economic, social and livelihood demands.

China’s 2,500 development zones demonstrate their immense productive capacity. The country’s 200+ national-level zones alone generated around 12 per cent of GDP in 2022. The mechanism is what economists call “collective efficiency”: proximity lets firms share what none could justify individually, including steam networks, water recycling and waste treatment — even each other’s by-products. The United Nations Industrial Development Organization’s (UNIDO) Global Eco-Industrial Park Programme, active across a dozen countries, documents how such synergies translate into real savings and lower emissions. Vietnam’s DEEP C and Nam Cau Kien’s steel by-product exchange are similar examples, as well as Thailand’s Map Ta Phut and Singapore’s Jurong Island.

For developing countries, parks remain the most practical stepping stone from primary production to manufacturing. The logic now extends to agro-industrial parks linking rural centralised facilities to central processing hubs, a model relevant to agriculture-rich ASEAN economies. But the caveat is well documented: behind every benchmark park are many underused zones that absorbed land and incentives yet generated little, as they were designed without a clear industrial development strategy.

The key is to fold industrial space into the wider urban plan, and to make the 45-minute standard guide planning from the outset.

The 45-minute test would apply the efficiency standard to the three main sustaining elements: For workers, the home-to-factory commute should not exceed 45 minutes, which entails well-linked housing and transport networks and a shift from temporary dormitory blocks to real townships. For the community, schools, clinics, markets and recreation should be within the same range, so the park is part of a town rather than a walled compound beside it. For production, suppliers, logistics nodes and a port or airport should be within comparable reach.

The 45-minute rule-of-thumb pursues both efficiency and welfare. It is a test to integrate productive activities with communities. Long commutes and poor living conditions drive the turnover and absenteeism that plague many zones. The most valuable synergies of modern parks, such as waste-to-energy, shared wastewater treatment and the circular economy, are urban-industrial by nature; hence, they work only when the city and the park are planned together.

The authors recently visited Suzhou Industrial Park, a China-Singapore joint venture that was designed from the outset to integrate production, living and ecological functions. Three decades on, it has reinvented itself as an innovation district with free-trade-zone status.

Integrated models that combine land, power, roads and housing with anchor investors can deliver real gains. The Indonesia Morowali Industrial Park (IMIP) in Central Sulawesi is a 5,000-hectare resource-processing complex with its own port and airstrip, employing more than 90,000 people and anchoring Indonesia’s nickel ambitions. It is a job-creation and investment attraction success, but it needs to mature in urban and community development to become a model that can be adopted more broadly.

AMATA City Rayong in Thailand is closer to the ideal. Rather than seeking self-sufficiency behind a fence, it is embedded in Thailand’s Eastern Economic Corridor, drawing on surrounding towns, labor markets, supplier networks and the region’s ports and airport. Its defining feature is a division of labor: the park specialises in production while regional networks provide housing, commerce, education and healthcare. Singapore goes furthest: under its Land Transport Master Plan 2040, it has committed to a “45-Minute City”, ensuring any major employment hub, including industrial parks, is reachable within 45 minutes by transport.

The principle holds beyond the region: business parks near Edinburgh in Scotland, Mexico’s AMPIP-tracked zone and Dubai Industrial City near Jebel Ali Port all cluster in the same range, moving away from enclosed production spaces toward designs coordinated with urban planning and public services.

Looking Ahead

The key is to fold industrial space into the wider urban plan, and to make the 45-minute standard guide planning from the outset. First, make the test a zone-approval criterion, weighing transport, housing and service commitments alongside investment pledges. Second, integrate community and environmental performance into park regulation, as in Vietnam’s Decree 35 eco-industrial certification and Indonesia’s inter-ministerial forum. Third, require local governments to coordinate park and city planning. Fourth, give operators the capacity to provide commuting, training and shared facilities, while governments retain responsibility for core infrastructure.

The next round of industrial competition in Southeast Asia won’t be won by the sites offering cheapest production. The 45-minute industrial park, paired with liveability concepts such as the “15-minute city”, presents a timely and promising option for enhancing industrial productivity while fostering livelihoods.

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