FREE-RANGE: HAPPY HEALTHY CHICKENS FEED HEALTHY HAPPY PEOPLE

Abstract

The thesis addresses Singapore’s low food resilience problem due to a high reliance on external agricultural imports. The issue is compounded by rising population and high food wastage in recent years. It aims to cultivate food consciousness and subsequently, inspire resource responsibility and initiative among the local community, by proposing a place for work-lifestyle immersion. As an anti-thesis to factory-like mass-food production, this is a place where users can be educated about the pleasures of growing and eating freshly-harvested organic food from an eco-centric, ethical farm.

This local project attempts to befit the title of a “Chicken Rice Capital of the World”. It focuses on cultivating free-range chickens in a high-technology farm, supplemented by fish and vegetables grown by Aquaponics as feed for both chickens and humans. Sited in nearly the city centre that is Kampong Bugis, the strategy undertaken is to intensify land vertically and functionally, so it becomes an open roaming space for 1000 chickens and also a work-recreational space for human-participants. The High Roam city farm will serve as a design prototype for showcasing and integrating resource systems, allowing for conventionally unthinkable free-range production to be seen as a possibility so that its limits can be assessed for future agricultural design ventures.