ReallyArchitecture is back again with “Really Ar?”2, at Night & Day Bar. As you might already know, Really Ar? is Re:act’s design sharing session that invites professionals to share about their recent projects in relation to a selected theme.

The theme for the night was “So this is Masterplanning!” and 3 guest speakers, Philip Tan from Surbana, Prasoon Kumar from HOK, and Yu Sern Hong from 5+Design shared their experiences and views on urban planning. In addition, there were 2 special presentations; one by Elaine Tan from the URA explaining the AUDE Programme and the other by Chong Keng Hua who talked about [re:act] Initiatives.

When it comes to urban planning, all 3 guest speakers seem to have very different methodologies but share a common vision of making cities a better place to live in. The examples each cited displayed the different strategies urban planners came up with when dealing with different city conditions.

The first guest speaker Mr Philip Tan (Surbana) presented some of Surbana’s on-going masterplanning projects in Colombo and Abu Dhabi. These projects were designed with reference to the success of the Singapore Masterplan. Most of the presented projects involved transforming unused land into cities, coming up with strategies to attract developers and solving land shortage issues. This led to them telling us  about their plans of re-settling residents so as to ensure a controlled distribution of the population density.  The importance of urban design as well as the promotion of a new city branding image were also emphasized.

Mr Prasoon Kumar from HOK talked about their current masterplanning proposal for Dharav, Mumbai, India. He shared their design process, intentions and visions for this project. Dharav is known to be a mega slum and Kumar showed us through their process of re-discovery the unique characteristics of Dharav and proposal of re-using the existing without disrupting the running of Dharav. During their design process, they took into account the contributions of  the local people living at the place, because they felt that the residents knew for themselves what the best solutions are.

If a comparison could be made of the speakers’ methodologies on urban design, Kumar seems to have a rather different, if not opposite opinion from Tan’s. Tan’s proposal is like an immediate makeover of a city or starting on an empty piece of land, for example a desert, while Kumar’s proposal was a  gradual city evolution, and a more down-to-up approach that involves the commitment and contribution of the locals. With constant communal involvement brings ownership to the city compared to immigrants whom just move into a newly designed city. Despite the project being still on a conceptual stage, it had a strong vision and social benefits for the city.

The last speaker, Mr Yu Sern Hong from 5+Design, gave us another different methodology from the previous speakers. Their project involved intensive researches on the site’s urban nature elements and urban behaviour and made use of scripting to assist them in the urban landscape design. It was a collaboration with teammates from different design fields, different nationalities and cities in LA for an urban design competition for Magok, Seoul. They proposed an urban design branding image of “Inter-city” that involves 3 sub-components of Inter-link, Inter-face and Inter-weave. They promoted a vision of sustainable lifestyle for the city. Despite still being in the conceptual stage, they were able to move one step ahead with some architecture and landscape designs to distinguish parts of the proposed city design.

ReallyAr? concluded with a Q&A session despite the overrun of the presentation. Despite the session lack of “liveliness” as most of the audience left the session after the last speaker, the few questions asked were very intriguing and were those which would make one question the practice and principles of urban planning. This made me think about how the learning attitude of many people seemed to become self-centered in the sense that a lot of knowledge is being absorbed from the community but much less contribution is being made back to the community. I also believe that this session must have been, for those who do not come from an architecture background, an insight on how cities evolve, particularly through planning.

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Really Ar? 2