Thinking About Cities

With the impeding growth of cities throughout the world, which of the models - or combination of the models - would be appropriate to address the ‘speed’ and ‘scale’ demands? Recent credible research has bravely quantified this future challenge as a ‘doubling of urban population with a tripling of area - all by 2030 - and the bulk of the housing would be low rise by a relatively poor population.â€? Unfortunately, effective strategies that respond to this scenario seem in short supply.

MIT (Asian Cities Cluster) in collaboration with Department of Architecture,NUS and 5ft Creatives present a workshop program which aims to carry out a comparison of two cities with opposite development philosophies: a highly controlled, development model as in Singapore with a more laissez faire situation as in Bangkok.

The program considers three issues in exploring possible strategies.

1) WHAT is proposed for the growth?
Where will people live? What form of housing is proposed, to accommodate the various income
groups? Who will build it? Where do the funds come from?

2) HOW will it be achieved?
What codes, guidelines, incentives, etc. are proposed to make the growth strategies come to life?

3) Can this be a MODEL for others?
What is needed to make it work? Particularly in the Singapore case, can this be duplicated in other
cities of the Third World? Would parts of the strategy would be able to be adopted that fit within the
individual context of cities?, - Do we WANT to do this elsewhere, is it a ‘good’ model, a good way to
live and a good way for cities? Meeting with families takes on a big role, in order to get a sense if the
model is ‘good’, and goes beyond bureaucratic and technical advantages. The model needs to deliver
‘good housing, for good cities’.

Structure and Methodology
The structure of the workshop is mainly collaborative, with a focus on the understanding of urbanism in
SE Asia. This brief research workshop will begin in Singapore (June 11-16) before moving on to Bangkok (June 17-23). The reason the workshop starts off in Singapore as a tour/visit/cursory look is because Singapore’s urbanism is pretty much like that of the Western counterparts, thus it’d be easy for participants to comprehend this mediating ground before going into the contrasting Bangkok urban form
and morphology.

If you would like to be involved in this workshop program, contact 5ft Creatives at office [at] fivefootway.com

Adib is the co-founder of 5ft Creatives and he loves to walk on the FIVEFOOTWAY.