PLAB Old Town (Heritage Precinct)
A Happy Tropical Zeitgeist – a place where we have it all, we treasure it all, we share it all
April 2022
Over the past few decades, the physical form of Paya Lebar Airbase has undergone destruction, reconstruction, expansion, and transformation to the beats of Singapore’s economic development. Its metamorphosis has displaced much of its past with newer memories with each iteration of economic, social, and spatial narrative.
What makes Singapore uniquely successful is its ability to reinvent itself in the face of adversities, and to anticipate future needs - it dares to dream. Going forward, Singapore’s Dream must extend beyond pure economic consideration. The wellbeing of local community, state, region and global communities must become a primary consideration.
Blueprint
The blueprint for future PLAB Old Town (Heritage Precinct) anticipates a creative and vibrant live-work-play ethos: a thriving community in a knowledge creation environment. In this future, urban design and architecture promote flexible and adaptable spaces for a 10 - 15 mins walking neighbourhood, creating a holarchy of connectivity with distinctive centres in each 150m - 300m radius neighbourhood.
The urban design of PLAB OLD Town (Heritage Precinct) expresses awareness of interactive spatial relations between users, knowledge, technology, and sustainable environment. The urban design parameters provide places and spaces that are amorphous, multi-layered, people centric, and energy efficient. This results in a pixelated precinct in which diverse social, economic, and recreational activities thrive. They provide possibilities for new practices of a creative economy to unfold. In addition, wellness is a key factor in the UD design, as all living things form the community. Each inhabitant is able to articulate living in the “A Day in the Life” narrative: a life that enriches the body and mind.
In tandem, Old Town (Heritage Precinct) also celebrates the Tropics. It pays tribute to ‘water’: acknowledging the essence of water in the past, present, and future. Old Town ‘collaborates’ with water to engender a sustainable resource environment. Water features prominently in the urban design of Old Town. It plays the duo role of preserving the memory of its past, as well as imprinting its presence through the town. It celebrates water as a life necessity and embraces the abundance of water in the Tropics. It is a sponge precinct - holding and releasing rainwater through a network of ponds and capillaries.
Old Town is a place to have fun - to play, to celebrate, and to share the joyous existence of water in the community.
Ambition
The aim of the blueprint is to distinguish PLAB Old Town as a unique Smart region in Singapore, developing a future sharing and caring city that is also forward-looking, yet always conscious of its history - a city which adapts and sensitively translates historical urban fabric to meet future needs as it grows organically.
In its transformation, it recognises that a city should have an urban palimpsest. Old Town is proud of its historical past as a swamp land, commercial airport, and military airbase. Old Town is proud of its urban fabric footprint in its iteration of birth (construct), live (use), death (demolish) and rebirth.
PLAB’s Old Town (Heritage Precinct) wants to be a distinctive place for joyously caring, sharing and living in a creative community set in the Tropics.