Mapping Urban Belonging in Places of Flux: Singapore

PI: Dr Felicity Hwee-Hwa Chan (LKYCIC, SUTD)
Team: Ms Chloe Ng (LKYCIC, SUTD)

Urban change in the next two decades in Singapore will be socio-spatial and multi-sourced as urban redevelopment will grow in scope and extent as the city’s built environment ages. Urban redevelopment is formidable and can exact emotional and social costs on individuals and groups as places, routines, and belongings become dislocated and disrupted. This presents a quandary of how urban change can be planned, designed, and managed in ways that enable belonging in the city, which is more often associated with stability than flux.

The project sets out to gain a better grasp of how urban residents perceive, conceive, and experience change in their neighborhoods, and in this context how they form their belongings in the city under conditions of change arising from redevelopment of their everyday urban environment. A comparative study of different neighborhoods (both private and public housing areas) undergoing different scales and stages of urban change aims to harvest insights about the socio-spatial attributes critical to the formation of belonging that can inform urban planning and policy of urban redevelopment in Singapore.

The data will be collected using digital cognitive mapping interviewing, a method valuable for accessing spatial consciousness, with urban residents from different demographic groups in the selected neighborhoods.

For more information on the research project, please email felicity_chan@sutd.edu.sg