Contemporary urban design is primarily driven by intuition and heuristic methods. Every year, more people move to urban areas in record scale and cities have grown dense and vertical to accommodate this unabated trend. This increasing density has encouraged cities like Singapore to design vertically integrated developments that comprises hospitals, supermarkets, shopping complex, public transportations, restaurants, parks, and other community facilities. However, the current design approaches do not account for, nor tap into the complexity of the system under study. As a complex system, a city and its people interact seamlessly effectively bringing cities to “life” [1]. The growth and life of the city have also been postulated to depend on its ability to serve as a facilitator for social interactions [1]. Three common factors that reveal the interaction between inhabitants and the built environment are: mobility, co-presence, and spatial configurations [2]. Given that, an informed design must therefore take into account the interplay between these factors. Specifically, looking at cities through the lens of complex adaptive systems will help design cities and microcosms of cities like integrated developments with efficient allocation of facilities, space use, and connectivity. This study aims to use a range of tools and methodologies borrowed from complexity science—especially network science and computational social science—to achieve a certain level of informed design. A case study is conducted in Singapore’s largest and most recent public integrated development—Kampung Admiralty [3], kampung meaning village in the Malay language—where the residents and facility users are tracked for two weeks using a custom mobile app that records barometric pressure, accelerometer, and Bluetooth scans from the beacons placed in the building and its vicinity. A spatial network analysis of Kampung Admiralty shows that the node with the highest betweenness centrality is the community lift lobby at level-1 that allows reachability to any place in the building with an average travel distance of 50 meters, which validates the design intention of the architects. The spatial network of Kampung Admiralty also shows evidence of the small-world property with a broad degree distribution due its vertical integration through various modes of vertical mobility [4]. The date-driven results will help inform future designs of integrated developments and hopefully establish a framework for evidence-based designs.
References:
1. Geoffrey B West. Scale: the universal laws of growth, innovation, sustainability, and the pace of life in organisms, cities, economies, and companies. Penguin, 2017
2. Alessandretti, L. (2018). Individual mobility in context: from high resolution trajectories to social behaviour. Doctoral Dissertation - University of London. https://doi.org/10.1111/etap.12031
3. Kampung Admiralty. Available online: https://www.hdb.gov.sg/cs/infoweb/residential/where2shop/explore/woodlan...
4. Barthélemy, M. Spatial networks. Phys. Reports 499, 1–101, DOI: 10.1016/j.physrep.2010.11.002 (2011). 1010.0302.