META-DWELL : EXPERIMENTING FRONTIERS FOR TOMORROW'S PUBLIC HOUSING IN SINGAPORE

Abstract

Since the 1960s, Singapore’s Housing Development Board (HDB) plans and develops public housing towns that provide Singaporeans with quality homes and living environments. Despite the rapid development, HDB continue to provide housings for the critical mass and also communal spaces around the estates as part of creating a cohesive environment. Currently, Singapore is facing population boom. To date, the country contains more than 5 million people within the 700 square kilometres of build up areas. Singapore’s policy makers are planning for 6.5 million people in 5 years. In order to provide more public houses, many 10 storey old housing blocks were replaced with 40 storey high-rise developments. This incurs high amount of energy on relocation of residents and demolition of huge parcel of lands. Social and economic connectivity were disrupted with the emergence of shifting urban landscape. This paper investigates the possible alternatives on intensifying residential population without the demolition of old housing estates, but rather re-adapting to its existing site, physical and social structure. The project also sees the emergence of a new prototype that creates a hybridization of both old and new future users. The thesis introduces customized housing components into the current rigid planning policies formulated by HDB, through the influence of John Habraken’s Open Building ideology that allows the residents to choose their own housing package and plan the environment with architects, thus promoting a more bottom up approach. By adopting the mature public housing estate of Tiong Bahru in Singapore, which was once an experimental site for high rise public housing after a fire disaster, the proposed housing prototype takes its contextual response to the old built form and reassessment of social values. Not only it adds on to the existing residential demography, but proves a vital point of creating new homes for city dwellers without the disruption of social lives.