Abstract
Singapore’s quick ascent from a third world to a full scale global city within a short 50 years have had dire effects upon the mental state of her citizens. Her citizens have seen the effects of modernity through their experience of living within a rapidly modernising city and have experienced the struggle to find themselves within the stresses of metropolitan living. As the cusp of the millennium, we have seen towering trophies of success and financial gains mushrooming densely within the Central Business District, each a mantlepiece in the meticulously planned skyline of Singapore. Heralded by many as the world’s economic model of success, the growth in our city seems swift, inevitable and desirable. While doing so, it neglects the scale of humans and their environment generating the phenomena of urban shock experienced by all who are thrust into the unrelenting world of the CBD. Despite the spectacular forms, the urban fabric of the CBD is surprisingly banal with homogeneous and monotonous urbanscape, dictating a street artery of movement along the rigid grid of streets in the CBD. However, within such rigidity and despite the overbearing weight of ‘urban shock’, people have managed to carve shortcuts out of the planned CBD. This bottom up and spontaneous way finding within the strict grid have lent a degree of control and humanity into the people’s occupation of the metropolis. The cultural forming of shortcuts through seemingly unrelenting surfaces of the cbd hints a potential for re-humanising the cbd. These shortcuts are just mono-functional circulatory paths, but they are the paths of least resistance where people are able to create human-scaled spaces for themselves, slicing through public and private domains within the cbd. As the city inevitably densifies, these bottom-up interventions would proliferate and continue to reinterpret the cityscape and attempt to strike a balance within. However, the organic circulatory shortcuts are unable to truly balance out the imbalanced in the cbd, and there is a need to inject life, breakout spaces, and informality. Along the routes of the shortcuts people have made, the intervention will aim to subvert this condition of the city, by bringing in the humanistic part of the world. This thesis aims to reclaim the city space, by expanding on the shortcuts to develop a more human centric cbd.