Weaving social tapestries
Place-based social infrastructure in Singapore
Social practices in Singapore have been highly reliant on state functions to develop, many orchestrated by national agencies through various social institutions. Covid-19 and evolving societal needs have revealed gaps in sustaining communities using institutional means, leading to fragile social bonds that fragment when unsupported. This thesis thus examines how we can sow new anti-fragile communities that are supported by heterogenous social infrastructure models. Choa Chu Kang is selected as a test bed, for it is a place with established groups, yet presenting opportunities to sow new ones and insert our interventions.
The first is encouraging sharing of space and property between people, an opportunity for a social mix, as well as sharing as a means to complement existing spaces. This is supported by building collaborative communities, where groups can come together and strengthen each other in mutually beneficial means, deepening social interactions. The architecture serves as a vessel to promote collaboration, made possible through the third strategy, organizing ownership. In sharing and publicness, we recognize possible friction between different groups. Thus, in the physical sense, we can encourage mediation through space manipulation.
Lastly, the infrastructure must afford the possibility to ad-hocs or add-ons, in the way of allowing the modular design to attach or detach as needed, and even for the residents themselves to add their own objects without compromising the function.
Throughout the study of social infrastructure, we must remind ourselves that space or digital space alone cannot force people together. It is not the direct answer to solving social issues or deep-seated community challenges, for there are intangible behaviours of individuals and groups that ultimately determine the success or failure of sustaining community spirit. Meditation of space, security, and conflict resolution are hard questions that can only be answered with greater community involvement in space making rather than through architectural solutions.
Yet what social infrastructure can do is to provide the physical qualities of space that foster communal practices, encouraging positive action while minimizing negative ones. We recognise that in designing, we must examine things across scale, from a large neighbourhood to a cluster of blocks, even down to individual spaces. In this, we can steer the community towards certain practices that allow them to build themselves up at an individual and collective scale. Social patterns are intrinsically tied to economic goals as well, and nurturing local businesses to spur social behaviours is a key component of a healthy ecology. Public spaces are then envisioned as activators that tap on the patterns of behaviour that we want to grow, tying groups together towards a collaborative objective. We can encourage communal ownership of public space, and with this lens, social infrastructure could build anti-fragile communities in Singapore.
