Establishing A Site

from AGROPOLIS | Reimagining Urban Food Security

Site Phasing

3.4 Establishing A Site

By establishing the number of car park sites needed to achieve the “30 by 30” goal, and understanding the key qualities that allow for architectural and urban planning designs to be propagated across Singapore, a series of sites must be identified as the beginning of a neighbourhood food hubs network.

In the scope of this thesis, a single site must be selected from one of the 932 potential HDB multistorey car parks around Singapore as a prototypical design opportunity. While manual examination would be possible, the large sample size would make it extremely tedious, so a computational analysis was instead chosen to quickly narrow down the selection.

The intention was to identify a typical HDB multistorey car park site which would share many characteristics with other sites. This would allow for the implementation of architectural strategies to connect people with food, which can then propagated throughout a series of subsequent sites, becoming a network of HDB neighbourhood food hubs around Singapore.

The selection first analysed five criteria which characterized each site. The first was the footprint area, which was scored based on how typical, or similar it was to other sites. The second was site orientation, which is relevant to optimise crop growth. The third was footprint typicalness, or how regular the footprint is, and the fourth was the number of surrounding HDBs. Lastly, each car park was also evaluated based on its proximity to other car parks to create a distribution mapping to prevent multiple sites to be chosen from the same area.

Area Typicalness

Footprint area of car park, scored based on similarity to other sites

Orientation Typicalness

Major axis of site orientation, relevant for crop growth optimisation, scored based on similarity to other sites

Footprint Typicalness

How rectangular the footprint is, scored based on an index from extremely rectangular to not at all

Surrounding HDBs

The number of encompassing HDBs, relevant for connecting communities with food production, car parks surrounded with more HDBs scored higher

Distribution

Proximity to other car parks, scored based on a distribution mapping to prevent multiple sites from being chosen from the same area

Car park “typicalness”

The HDB car parks are graded on an index from 0 to 1, where 1 is highly rectangular. From the graph, more than half of all the HDB car parks evaluated are very rectangular, with the median grade being 0.98.

Car park orientation

W 130

119 N

176

76 121

For orientation, most car parks have either a northsouth, or east-west facing, which is advantageous in this case because it would also allow for better sun exposure for farming.

164 E

Car park area

A large majority of HDB multi-storey car parks fall within 1,500 to 4,000m2, with the median at 2,300m2. Sites whose area are closer to the median would therefore score better.

932 HDB multi-storey car park sites and their final scoring

From the initial evaluation, an additional step was conducted on the top scorers to further filter out any unsuitable sites. Two of them, arrangement of HDB blocks and contextual opportunities, were qualitative, and were to allow for architectural considerations which would have otherwise been difficult to do computationally.

Based on the results of the computational and qualitative analyses, three sites, which ranked fourth to sixth, were chosen for further study.

Selected Site Locations

The three sites are located in Ang Mo Kio, Toa Payoh and Tampines, which all happen to be large, mature HDB estates.

They were all built in the 1990s, and have similar footprints and floor counts. They are also surrounded with HDB blocks, but each having their own site conditions. The black HDB blocks are those that are served by the car park itself.