Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project is a vast montage of 19th century Paris in which he quotes and reflects on topics such as Parisian arcades, fashion, flaneur, advertising, prostitution, etc. By rag-picking from printed sources a wealth of details about daily existence, Benjamin brings to life a world of things. As a start of the research project, the first Chapter of the Arcades Project is carefully examined and redrawn with my understanding in two mediums – literary and visual montage. From there, the derived method of presenting Paris is adopted and applied to the research of Singapore’s Heartland and the Central Business District (CBD), the area of interest and the site of the project, respectively.
Section A: Infilling the CBD with Urban Living
In heartlands, state-imbued “perfection” relating to orders and standards had been constructed and applied to many aspects, from architecture, conducts, to government documents. As inspired by Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project, the research project explores the authentic image of the heartland by “rag-picking” gaps that are excavated from a myriad of resources, ranging from online articles, publications, to poems and photographs by local artists. The research unveiled that under the state-constructed perfection, gaps are created mainly through the users and usages. The beauty of gaps makes heartlands colourful and livable places that redefines the idea of perfection.
While also having a “perfect” image in terms of its planning and urbanscape, the CBD for the period of post-pandemic are analysed using the same method of research. By looking at categories such as Architecture and History of Land Reclamation, gaps are identified as the rich supply of amenities that used to be carriers of social lives pre-pandemic, but left severely underused when their users vanished because of the pandemic policies. Such amenities identified on site include bars and restaurants and shops and supermarkets (e.g. 7-11s). Hence, with social amenities in place in the CBD, bringing back users and urban living becomes the pending issue.
Further Inspired by the idea of the flaneur, the social life observer, conveyed in the Painter of Modern Life by Charles Baudelaire and A Bar at the Folies-Bergère by Édouard Manet, the project proposes a new protagonist of urban living – the delivery man, the overlooked contemporary user and observer of post-pandemic urban living.
Section B: Accommodating the Delivery Men as Contemporary Users and Observers of the New Normal
The Users of the New Normal
The pandemic and the aftermath saw the CBD devoid of life and activities. While work-from-home policies emptied the skyscrapers, supporting amenities like restaurants, bars, convenience stores were affected. The lack of a residing population within the CBD further meant that these facilities and public urbanscapes became transient spaces, namely thoroughfares for services and especially the delivery person, who travels back and forth between these service providers and the populated HDB districts located at the periphery of the CBD to deliver food and services. While the objective of infilling the CBD with urban living is underlined in Section A of the project, the profession of the delivery man, as an overlooked user of urban space under the new-normal is also highlighted.
The Observers of the New Normal
The implementation of the various phases of lockdowns have limited most activities to the home, and gatherings to small numbers. As a result, the delivery personnel who move about have become the main connective conduits for people and the activities that cannot be personally carried out. Similar to Mr M. G., the 19th century Parisian flaneur concocted in the imagination of Charles Baudelaire in his book, the Painter of Modern Life, Mr and/or Ms Delivery in this instance is the contemporary protagonist who observes and collects different forms of lives at every corner of Singapore, though not in the form of paintings, and not in prolonged moments in cafés but through continuous movement.
While moving between households and businesses, Mr. and Ms. Delivery see snippets of life, intermittently hear whispers, cries or laughter, and have brief conversations with different individuals. On job review websites, though complaints such as “constantly on-the-go” and “fast-paced and back-breaking” appear from time to time, indicating a need to design proper work-life balance and specialized facilities, the happiness working as a delivery person can also be glimpsed: “learned much about the community with people”, “learn more about people characteristics and behavioural”, “see something new every day”, “make a good friend”.
Thus, this project proposes to enhance the positive qualities of this often overlooked profession and explore their contributions as ‘modern flaneurs’ and observers of the urban scape and urban living, by creating a heterotopia through networks and spaces that foregrounds Mr and/or Ms Delivery and their daily adventures.
The proposed architecture occupies and connects the left-over and in-between spaces amongst the existing vacant skyscrapers. Hence, from the reclaimed ground from where the CBD sprung, the airspace has now also been reclaimed. The architecture comprises of three integrated layers that supplement each other. The first is the connections crossing over the space in-between existing skyscrapers. They capitalise on the fast and slow movements of the delivery people, paying special attention to opportunities that exaggerate ‘slower’ movements, allowing the design to encapsulate the fun aspects– observing and exploring urban living - of their job. The second comprises of housings, shops, markets, and playgrounds that infill urban living into the CBD. The last layer consists of specially designed facilities for Mr and Ms Delivery in order to address their needs as overlooked users of urban space. These facilities such as parking, storage and charging, and service and maintenance perform as walls, floors and structures that supplement the first and second layer.
In summary, the proposed network infills the CBD with heartland living to revitalize the current CBD while also function as places of work-life balance after the pandemic. In addition, the profession of the delivery man that has been foregrounded during the pandemic is taken as the protagonist of the heterotopia, which is designed for them to enjoy quality working as a user in the new normal and ensue his or her identity as an observer of the new normal. The collation of Mr and Ms Deliveries’ experiences creates a unique montage of post-covid urban living that forms a chapter in the Singapore version of Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project.
