Bukit Canberra, the new 12-hectare integrated development in Sembawang, is introducing a new urban form set in a green haven, with its diverse uses from fitness to food, wellness, and park spaces. The design and project leads, DP Architects’ Chief Executive Officer, Seah Chee Huang and Senior Associate Director, Chin Li Nah, share how the project pushes the boundaries on the concept of co-location as well as their dreams for new kinds of recreational spaces and opportunities.
Located near Sembawang MRT station and opened from 2022, Bukit Canberra is an integrated sports and community hub providing a wide range of amenities to meet the needs of the residents in the area. Image: DP Architects.
A key aspect of Bukit Canberra as an integrated co-located development is how its diverse uses are purposefully organised to explore new possibilities and experiences for residents. Tell us more.
Chee Huang: Learning from our earlier co-located developments such as Our Tampines Hub and One Punggol, Bukit Canberra enables us to experiment and push the co-location concept further, beyond adjacency to synthesis and synergy. As opposed to grouping uses based on facilities managed by different government agencies, we set up a framework to organise uses according to their programmatic synergies – how the spaces relate to one another for vibrancy and collaboration, and how users relate to the spaces and other users for stronger interaction and bonding. For example, instead of the traditional approach of placing Sport Singapore and Ministry of Heath (MOH) facilities in their own zones, we intentionally nestled sports and care facilities in close adjacency to create spatial and programmatic opportunities for enhanced collaboration between stakeholders and the community. The Senior Care Centre, under MOH Holdings’ care, is located in close proximity to the public gym and swimming pools. The seniors can conveniently utilise these facilities, designed with universal access, as part of their care programme too.
Interrelated uses in Bukit Canberra are organised based on four core focus areas: greenery, water, food and health. Image: DP Architects. (View high res image)
By doing this, we also provide more opportunities for spontaneous discoveries. Such interdependent mix of uses naturally bring different groups of people together which can maximise interactions and encourage further participation. This is a key strategy that we have learnt from designing other integrated community and sports developments that have yielded positive outcomes of greater cohesion and participation from residents and stakeholders. Li Nah: In organising the spaces, what is most important is to approach it from the residents’ point of view, in understanding how they will use the spaces and how the experience and use of the spaces will benefit them. In my many visits to the site, I have observed how people access and use different amenities seamlessly. For example, fathers who bring their sons for swimming lessons at the pool would move on to have lunch at the nearby hawker centre on the premises; people who bring their grandparents to the senior care centre would then pick up medication at the pharmacy nearby.
In creating a green haven, you have gone beyond providing green buildings and roofs to creating more ecologically connected habitats, and differentiated vegetation and experiences. Tell us more about your approach.
Chee Huang: Our approach was to create an architecture that works with the biodiversity and ecology of the existing site instead of imposing itself and weakening the natural system. With our landscape consultant partner, Henning Larsen, we leveraged on the natural assets of the site to introduce community spaces while intensifying the greenery in the in-between spaces and levels to further enhance liveability and biophilia. In Bukit Canberra, the buildings and spaces are designed in a way that retains the existing natural topography, and provides a network of green and blue spaces, allowing them to continue to flourish.
A perspective showing the approach to creating a more responsive urban scape. Image: DP Architects. (View high res image)
There is a deliberate design of a variety of public plazas and community spaces throughout Bukit Canberra. Why is this important?
Co-located uses have evolved from community centres to more mixed-use community hubs like Our Tampines Hub (OTH) and Kampung Admiralty. What are the challenges and directions you foresee in our exploration of mixed-use co-located developments?
One of the strategies in the Recreation Master Plan is to tap on existing under-utilised spaces in our neighbourhoods to turn them into community nodes that can be conveniently accessed and enjoyed by residents. What kinds of spaces can we tap on and what would you like to see more of?
The space under the Benjamin Sheares Bridge offers a quieter alternative place for people to jog, stroll, cycle or to just enjoy the outdoors.
Chee Huang: In addition to the large-scale recreational activities and cultural or historical attractions, there is equal potential for smaller and more network-based everyday spaces, like our bus stops and void decks, to also serve as extensions of our social and recreational landscape. Some years back, we experimented with the idea of creating a prototype bus stop where we reimagined the ubiquitous transit amenity as a mini playground, a library, a garden with interesting activities to keep commuters engaged and find delight even while waiting for the bus.
Another avenue to tap on is community spaces in our neighbourhoods such as void decks. We designed a series of Goodlife senior centres in various void-deck spaces with our partner, Montfort Care, that focused on food and carpentry. The challenge as well as opportunity here, is how we can celebrate this network of community-based centres and components that are contiguous with our public realms, to synergise with bigger hubs and public domains for expanded uses for the community. The idea here is really to allow wider segments of our society to be more connected physically, socially and emotionally, so that our cities remain sites of imagination, possibility and serendipity.