SITUATED CREATIVITY AND TYPOLOGY: THE ARCHITECTURE OF A CREATIVE MILIEU

Abstract

”For Singapore to stay ahead, we must develop a creative culture to attract and retain the best talent. Place remains a critical factor for hubbing and incubating creativity, innovation and talents – and design has an important role in creating outstanding facilities, architecture, places, systems and touch points to make Singapore one of the best places for creative people to live, work and play.” - “Dsg-Il”, Strategic Blueprint of the DesignSingapore Initiative (2009)

Creativity is like an epidemic; a concept of contagiousness where every city now wants to be part of the game, Singapore notwithstanding.

Yet, while much has been written about the creative city trajectory and how or why cities should court and keep creative people, comparatively little has been written about the socio-spatial qualities within the city that would appeal to their choice of residency and the work they actually do there.

Richard Florida highlighted in his works that cities require sites that are valued for authenticity and uniqueness in order to distinguish themselves and woo in the residency of creative people. Furthering Florida’s research, Richard Lloyd used the success of Wicker Park in Chicago, Illinois to underscore the additional importance of typology and place-making as critical elements for attracting the creative crowd to produce a local creative milieu for the city.

This dissertation was thus birthed as a response to these Western concepts as well as an observation and curiosity to understand reasons behind the recent trend of ‘creative precincts’ emerging spontaneously in established neighbourhoods of Singapore, raising the notion: is there a type of (existing building) typology that helps to reinforce or flourish creativity in a local context?

Henceforth, the dissertation seeks to elaborate on the research of Florida and Lloyd by applying and assessing their relevance in Singapore. It will commence by defining key terms that will set the parameters to guide the research, followed by ground investigations that will focus primarily on Yong Siak Street, Waterloo Centre and Sam Tat Building. These three case studies have been selected because apart from being the three most in vogue indie creative enclaves of the moment, they share a similar storyline to Wicker Park; whose previous identities as marginalised areas dotted with existing/obsolete buildings instantly became cool when a few creative people and clusters began to take up residence there, generating new demands in a previously uncontested space.

The aim of this contribution is first, to present an anatomy of a creative city by characterizing and analyzing the underlying dynamics of situated creativity through an exploration of its relationship with various scales of socio-spatial typology. Additionally, it seeks to explore possibilities of how the product from an interface of both domains may serve as a driving force to reappropriate the existing fabric of the city through a reuse and revaluing of existing buildings in Singapore. Finally, by examining the actual processes that lead to the formation of a local milieu, contestations will be discussed on how these local ecologies of creativity could be viewed and the importance of such collective forms as part of a necessary contagious process in creating an overall creative milieu for Singapore to become “one of the best places for creative people to live, work and play.”