Designing for Inclusion: Gender, Urbanism, and Frameworks for Social Sustainability

Project Summary

This project explores women’s experience of the city and is situated within the broader discourse of feminist interventions in the built environment. It uses the former Singapore Chinese Girls’ School campus at 37 Emerald Hill (37EH), and its surrounding vicinity, as a case study site. The campus, originally set for demolition, has been earmarked for conservation as a result of a powerful alumni campaign to save the campus in 2018. The pilot will engage these alumni, as well as other residents and users of the 37EH area, to document and explore the female experience of the space. 

This is a joint-project between the Civic Resilience Lab (CiRe) and the Social Design Lab (SoDL) at the NUS Department of Architecture.  

Objectives & Research Questions

Explore women’s lived experiences in the city, highlighting the importance of highlighting diverse perspectives in urban design.

Develop new and transferable methodologies for spatial ethnography and qualitative GIS, visualising rich lived experience through: walk-along interviews, multimedia journey mapping, oral histories, and 3D digital representation.

Methodology

This study will investigate both built environment factors such as safety, comfort, and security, as well as emotional and attachment-based factors such as conviviality, attachment, and nostalgia.

The methodology is based on new techniques of multimedia journey mapping using action cam (i.e. GoPro) in the walking interviews and qualitative GIS. The action cam also geolocate the participants as they move, collecting their coordinates to generate insights about the routes they choose when navigating the city. Photographs and voice recordings will be collected as well for later transcription and analysis. Additionally, participants’ mental maps, anecdotes, and annotations will be collected and supplemented with analytical sectional and architectural drawings and photography.

Outputs

Together, the data collected in this study will inform a gender-focused inclusive design guide for architects and planners in Singapore, including those who may work on the redevelopment and conservation of 37EH. The guide will serve as a prototype design toolkit for architects, developers, and planners involved in developing transient urban, commercial, and public spaces. It will prioritise the following: (i) social inclusion and the facilitation of community building through shared communal spaces; (ii) safety and security for women and girls working and living in the area; (iii) the re-introduction of heterogeneous communally-invested spaces in the commercial precinct.