Wasteless Yuhua
BY Leow Xing Ni
SUPERVISED BY Senior Visiting Fellow, Victoria Jane Marshall (Dr.)
STUDIO THEME HUMANS, NONHUMANS, AND NONHUMAN AGENCIES
Abstract
This project is an inquiry into the relationships between waste, society and the environment in Singapore. With the rapid filling up of Singapore’s one and only landfill, the Semakau Landfill, Singapore currently faces the issue of waste overgeneration. I ask, might architecture address this issue by reconfiguring the relationship between waste, society, and the environmment? I explore this question through a sample neighbourhood of one and a half kilometer square, the Yuhua Estate and its surrounding areas, which are located in the west region of Singapore. According to studies and surveys done amongst residents, it is difficult to minimise residential waste. Some of the main challenges to reducing residential waste in Singapore include lack of recycling knowledge, and the perception that recycling is inconvenient and secondary in a person’s daily routine. Furthermore, there is little incentive to reduce, as residential waste is currently charged at a fixed rate or fee per household regardless of the quantity of waste disposed. I tackle these challenges spatially through three design strategies. First, I propose an informal pedestrian loop intertwined with void deck spaces to host the various waste-related programs that reduce waste generation in the Yuhua Community. The programs are targeted to manually upcycle or repair residents’ household waste in a convenient and accessible manner. Second, I propose that an old secondary school campus be repurposed into a recycling shelter, and multiple mini incinerators to be located on top of selected residential buildings within the loop to provide a transparent recycling and incinerating process for the residents to see as a way increase waste awareness within the community. Last, I propose an ash-scape within the old secondary school campus that is made of incineration ash and other earth materials to provide residents with mixed-use spaces within the school.
Supervisor Comments
The project Waste Degeneration creatively re-imagines the refuse of Yuhua, a public housing estate in Singapore. The thesis asks, what if various waste streams were revalued as socially and environmentally productive urban elements? Learning from a close study of seven types of existing waste, Xing Ni creatively rethreads each stream into underutilized spaces like an old school, rooftops, and void decks. A large organizing element is a loop, which serves to anchor various nodes for waste reuse into a legible corridor and to bring various estates together through shared, practices of recycling.
- Senior Visiting Fellow, Victoria Jane Marshall (Dr.)