EXTENDING COMMUNITY PARTICIPATORY DESIGN IN SINGAPORE: THE ROLE OF DESIGNERS

Abstract

In recent years, community participatory design (CPD) efforts by the government and non-profit organisations (NPO) such as Participate in Design (P!D) have been on the rise in Singapore. Current efforts have been commendable but limited by passive citizen response and monopolising governmental control over the built environment. Re-looking at the platform of stakeholders, CPD also involves facilitators that mediate the gap between the government and community. Future CPD practices in Singapore could be powered by a specific group of facilitators – designers of the architecture and urban planning fields. On top of their technical expertise to formulate buildable forms, designers could act as a neutral communicator between the government and community or transfer basic design skills to the community to empower them.

The paper aims to investigate the roles of various stakeholders with overseas and local case studies, with particular focus on the role of designers. By mapping the idea of community facilitators onto the evaluation of the role of designers in each case study, insights about potential roles that designers could take on and possible problems that could arise would be concurrently distilled and evaluated against the context of Singapore.

Within the budding discourse of CPD in Singapore, this paper offers a preliminary research on the potential of designers and the realities involved in engaging them as community facilitators. The potentials of designers include the idea of neutrality and transfer of design knowledge, while limitations such as elitist mindsets, differentiation within designers and their lack of ability to ensure long-term sustainability of projects could jeopardise their effectiveness.

Ultimately, this paper argues that designers in Singapore could take up the role of the community facilitator, with support from the other stakeholders namely the government, non-design facilitators and citizens.