Final Year Project
LASALLE College of the Arts
Year: 2021
In Singapore, apathetic attitudes towards politics and civic engagement can be linked to overtly functional urban planning that has conditioned people to produce dominant rules of social behaviour.
Citizen participation has only been recently recognised as an impactful platform to include communities in the shaping of the urban environment. However, despite attempts, decades of non-participation have conditioned citizens to be apathetic & skeptical towards community participation.
Soft Interventions was inspired by the urban hacktivism movement, a citizen-led, creative method of recreating public space often in a “do-it-yourself” style.
A series of five objects were created to reinvent the use of everyday public spaces. “Soft” in this sense refers not only to the materiality of the objects but also referring to its impermanence; a reference to the tracelessness of Singapore’s urban environment.
The Catalog of Inclusion & Exclusion is an online collection of third spaces, laws & policies and physical artefacts that act as active actors in influencing the inclusion and exclusion of particular communities.
To access the Catalog, one needs to complete the “National Social Survey” where the user is profiled and information is restricted depending on their personal profiles. This exercise of empathy acts as a reflection of how one’s social identity is inevitably linked to their belonging in the city.