MAIN FEATURE
Systemic problems require systemic solutions, and to progress towards a sustainable future, a paradigm shift from analytical thinking to systems thinking is imperative.
Universities have understood the value of systems thinking, with translational research today being developed across disciplines. This perspective, however, has yet to be fully embraced in city planning as political cycles and drivers heavily influence the way issues are framed and chosen for policy development in the short electoral term, rather than carried through in the sustainable long term. Government agencies, likewise, continue to push for their own agendas in silos, rather than identify and embrace common goals for the greater good. Similarly, corporations are not incentivised to consider the civic duty of every development and its contribution to the public realm. Although Singapore has one of the most forward-thinking public sectors in the world with strategic policies for land use optimisation, urban greenery, water conservation etc., it still lacks overall ambition and is not effective enough in pushing the frontiers of 21st
-century urban
planning when in fact, Singapore has the ideal conditions to be an urban laboratory. With its compact island footprint and defined borders, Singapore is able to monitor flows, regulate a closed-loop system, test bed ideas and pilot innovation, potentially leading the way for impactful and sustainable urban solutions.
In a vertical studio that WOHA spearheaded with the National University of Singapore (NUS) in 2009 to explore future scenarios for Singapore in 2050, the studio invented a new overarching agency called the Urban Integration Authority (UIA). The UIA’s role was conceived to cut across all the institutionalised entrenched divisions, fully model cross-agency collaboration and take charge of urban integration. The studio then drafted a Land Sale of Site document with hypothetical planning guidelines for all the coastal plots of Singapore. This included objectives and targets for energy production, water rights, waste ownership, happiness index, quality of life index, biodiversity index and ecosystem requirements, amongst others. The studio went on to test radical cross-programmed infrastructure as well as innovative urban and architectural typologies to address the pressing issues of energy, food and water security.
WOHA continued to develop these ideas in a 2013 competition entry for the new town of Tengah in northwest Singapore and revised it a year later for a proposed master plan in northern Jakarta that was conceived as a Self-Sufficient City. Such is the scale of policy ambition and urban vision that Singapore needs to progress forward as an exemplary prototype of the 21st
-century city for Asia and the world. FORM FOLLOWS SYSTEMS
Approaching architecture from a systems point of view requires developing an attitude that looks beyond producing a standard podium-tower-envelope default response to site boundaries and building setbacks. It begins with recognising that every development interacts with all the other systems in the adjacent plot, the district, the city and the natural world, and then designing to enhance this connectedness so as to strengthen the resilience of the whole. WOHA’s creative process involves finding innovative ways for the city’s various systems—natural, ecological, social, infrastructural and technological—to strategically interconnect and overlap, contributing positively to the public realm and networks of shared spaces and flows.
Form-making for WOHA is therefore not a prescription to any particular style or trend, but a process. Nineteenth-century American architect Louis Sullivan famously coined the phrase “form follows function”, defining the starting point for a building’s design to be its purpose, rather than its aesthetics. WOHA’s design genesis, however, extends beyond the function of the building to its relationship with the systems of the city such as land use, public space, community, mobility, urban greenery, biodiversity, energy, food, water, waste, etc. WOHA’s Form Follows Systems approach involves integrating society, nature and environmental services in sustainable and synergistic ways that share and reciprocate. This requires a radical rethinking of urban morphologies and building typologies in the ways that they contribute to the city environmentally, ecologically, socially and productively. No longer is it adequate for developments to simply do less harm. In the 21st
century, WOHA posits that every design intervention must strive to do more good—both ethically, in terms of sustainability and sociability, as well as aesthetically, in terms of form.
4 Lush landscape of WOHA’s Self-Sufficient City for Jakarta
FUTURARC 67
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