LOTS TO CHANGE - PLACEMAKING THROUGH CAR PARK CONVERSION

Abstract

Car parks, as often abandoned “lost space” and forgotten public space in the urban landscape, are soon becoming underutilized community asset as car lite movement takes shape in the near future. Singapore, despite being a land scarce city, is starting to experience car park surplus in many parts of the city. Since then, car park transformation through placemaking strategies into public spaces in HDB carparks has been taking place. However, carpark placemaking remains a critically understudied domain which warrants attention to the research.

This research aims to examine how to best transform the remaining car parks into socially desirable public space through placemaking. Drawing comparisons from other country and literature review, the theoretical concepts of place governance and good public space is applied in Singapore’s context of which their applicability in Singapore are tested using research data from interview, surveys, observational study and literature review.

A total of 177 surveys and 9 interviews were derived from the research and the main findings revealed a potential to improve social interaction amongst residents through placemaking of carparks driven by the common consensus and interest of both the government and the community. However, effective place governance is inhibited by the inability of the community to act as agents of change due to the hard-handedness of the authority and also the lack of will from the community to participate in community place making. This paper therefore reveals the complexity in the reconciliation between bottom-up and top-down approaches in the area of urban planning, using car park transformation as an example.