APPROPRIATION OF AUTOMOBILE INFRASTRUCTURE : 'TACTICS' TRANSCENDING THE AUTHORSHIP IN THE CITY

Abstract

The role of cars in our society is undeniable. It alone shapes the flows, the zones, the laws, the experience and many other facets of our automobile society. Automobile infrastructure has become a crucial element within our landscape and we are undeniably dependent on it for connectivity. However, despite its ability to allow for morphological continuity within our urban scape, they create barriers within the social fabric of the city, fragmenting it. The car might be seen as breeding a form of civic autism with it acting as a barrier –pod-like– to the wider public life. However, there are the socially active spaces spawning within these insular pods. Automobiles provide protective environments, which breeds the latent possibilities where civic participation occurs, in terms of the exchange of different ideas. This also happens in the extended comfort zone borrowed from the automobiles - they do not merely provide the cocoons inwardly but even as a physical object, they are able to craft spaces of privacy beyond their inner volumes, acting as mobile urban furniture. Privately owned properties, the automobiles run on the most public of spaces and contribute to the character and experience of these spaces. They empower their users with the ability to influence their environment, the automobile infrastructure, and be the author of fragments of the city through creative appropriation. They serve as a common language and platform in terms of their users being able to empathise with similar causes, having identities revolving around their automobiles and the ability of automobiles to act as a cloak – making the appropriations seem harmless to others.

This allows for the purely instrumental and under used infrastructure, which have become non-places to us, to opportunistically reinterpret themselves. Thus, this might potentially create new types of public spaces - where ephemeral light communities, which do not discriminate - exist. The bare infrastructural make-up of these infrastructures allows for the creative tactical appropriations of the space where everyone has a personal stake in the overall creation of the fabric and atmosphere of the space. After all, the convergence of the car, which is a moving piece of space, and the parking, which is a static resting space, allows for both the moving and static space to be amalgamated, which is an exclusive condition, which can only be provided by automobile infrastructure.

Studying Yishun Avenue 1, a stretch of road which is one of the most popular sites in Singapore where such appropriation occurs, this paper seeks to understand what fundamentally makes the appropriation of the automobile infrastructure attractive and the dynamics and the physical and spatial resultants of the appropriation and its interactions.