Abstract
In the absence of formally demarcated public spaces to enact their collective identity, informal communities carve out enclaves within loose pockets of the local urban fabric by frequently occupying them, appropriating them, and giving them a new definition of their own. Social and cultural preconceptions revolving such threshold spaces predetermine our range of movement, level of engagement, and experience in the city. The institutionalization and privatization of public spaces further results in a splintered and displaced engagement with the city, rendering the lack of a phenomenological experience and identity of Singapore as a whole. The thesis envisions the stepping away of public behaviour from the familiarity of the ‘self’ to the unpredictability of the ‘other’, and the opening of our people towards an alternative public culture of mutual awareness, acceptance and interdependence. The proposed network of public spaces leverages upon the accessibility and indeterminacy of existing loose heterotopias in brewing a climate of creative anarchy arising from an everyday exchange of people, activities, ideas and culture, and in catalysing a cultural regeneration of a state that is defined by no one but its citizens. This thesis explores public space as a pedagogy aimed at nurturing social resilience and coexistence - to use the everyday space as a critical urban learning process in suturing our increasingly diverse yet fragmented society, through diffusing new forms of collective urban public life. It proposes for a network of public spaces that disrupts the routine, hierarchy and boundary condition of space today, to bring about alternative experiences, engagement and exchange between diverse people. The intervention aims to learn from existing forms of informality and harness the power of their undefined spatiality, in perforating the borders dividing our heterogeneous community and creating an osmosis of identities and everyday experiences. Disparate social groups are re-imagined as characters in dialogue, against the backdrop of public space as a theatre of spontaneous encounters, critical engagement, creative improvisation and passionate expression.