Session 1 / Singapore Live Program: Seeking a Resilient Dimension - Augmenting Our Sense of Community

Seah Chee Huang
Deputy Chief Executive Officer
DP Architects, Singapore

Seeking the Resilient Dimension - Augmenting Our Sense of Community
The COVID-19 pandemic has sparked a phenomenon of social distancing, heightening our consciousness of interaction spaces between individuals and groups, while challenging conventional notions of social gathering and cohesion. Inspired by Edward T. Hall’s theory of proxemics, where spatial zones are influenced by culture and physical settings, the aforementioned phenomenon allows us to reimagine how society can cope with the current challenge and stay connected in alternative spatial fashions. This is driven by the belief that the intrinsic value of community and social connection, especially in challenging times, strives towards augmenting the social spaces that safeguard well-being in urban life.
This presentation defines resilience for communities, achieved through offering alternative strategies towards the design of city and architecture. By re-centering the focus on one’s basic threshold of needs and well-being, urban cores can be further decentralized, with neighborhoods enhancing their self-sufficiencies, to accommodate more granular, localized resources and create 10-minute community and economic clusters. With refreshed planning, urban operations, and design, the resilient dimension that emerges from these interrogations highlights the shifts from wealth to health, high optimization to purposeful redundancy, inclusivity, and environment-centricity. Ironically, it reveals the ways that the COVID-19 pandemic may have brought us closer, by allowing us to re-examine more responsible ways to build livable cities, vibrant communities, and a healthier environment.