Abstract
“They paved paradise and put up a parking lot.” Since the car boom in the 20th century, the parking lot, augmented by the parking garage, joined the widened street and highways to produce a new urban geography dedicated to automobile use. However, this may soon be reversed. We find ourselves on the cusp of a revolutionary change in society’s dependence of carparks. The past few years has seen a concurrent development in autonomous vehicle technology as well as of the sharing economy. This thesis postulates the context where these two trends merge, presenting a realistic scenario whereby people are simply picked up and dropped off cars which are part of an autonomous ride-sharing fleet. As such, carpark spaces are no longer required at destinations. With respect to the persistent land scarcity problem in Singapore, this thesis thus reimagines how carparks may be transformed in the future for better uses and insertions of new programmes through analysis and subsequent operations on the existing infrastructure. In the chosen site in the Central Business District, the dense manifestation of carparks in the area is also identified as a strategic opportunity for carparks to operate as urban stitches to create a new seamless horizontal realm for pedestrian movement. The concurrent mesh of both new functions of carparks as an urban connection and active programmes thus generates a new vibrant paradise which previously would not have been possible to fit within the existing infrastructure.