Placemaking through empathy
In a city so carefully governed and regulated, placemaking initiatives in Singapore quite often come from the top. The result is striking: a skyline dominated by iconic design, a mid-rise populated as a shopper’s paradise, and a ground level landscaped as an urban garden.
Yet, in a city as culturally diverse as Singapore, it can sometimes be challenging to create places that meet the needs of everybody – aligning the interests of stakeholders as diverse as commercial demands and community priorities.
Billy Kwan, co-founder of the stakeholder alignment firm, Rhindon, has set out to bridge this gap.
Billy met me for coffee on the bustling corner of Paya Lebar Quarter, to tell me more.
“There’s a nice chemistry between architects and urban planners”
Hi Billy, it’s great to meet you. Let’s start by exploring how you found your way into the world of placemaking.
Well, having grown up in Hong Kong, I did my undergrad and masters in Urban Planning at UCL, London. After that, I actually had a scholarship to study a PhD in Hong Kong, but after two years I realised that academia is not for me. I prefer a much more dynamic environment.
That’s when I joined an architectural practice, the Oval Partnership, and there I worked on master-planning projects in China, Hong Kong, and one or two projects in the UK as well.
I started to realise that there’s a nice chemistry between architects and urban planners. I do more of the strategic thinking, whereas architects look at the bigger picture. I thought there’s an opportunity there. I guess that’s how I started doing hands-on placemaking, getting really involved in consultation and activation. It’s been a constantly evolving process ever since then.
So how did you come to co-found Rhindon?
For family reasons, I made the move to Singapore in 2019. My then girlfriend and now wife was based here while I was in Hong Kong, and it just wasn’t sustainable to fly to Singapore every weekend. So I moved over here. For the first year I ran a BID, a business improvement district, but after that I thought I’d much prefer to be a consultant. At the end of the day, I much prefer ‘creating’ to ‘managing’ – a placemaker, not a place manager.
That’s when I thought, why don’t I start a consultancy business that focuses on user-centric design, and apply the design thinking methodology in the public arena?
What was the core ambition of Rhindon when you started out?
I often believe that people are always at the centre of what we do, and this is more than just a nice slogan – when we say people, it is more than just ‘the public’, but all stakeholders involved in the project, including the client, which often are the private sector or government agencies. Regardless of their background, everyone deserves our full attention to understand their needs, challenges, and their aspiration, so that we know full well what we are creating, why and how.
Sometimes I look at placemaking from a broader perspective, using place as an opportunity to give people a chance to improve their quality of life. Get people to come together, share their skills, and to co-create a place that is better for everyone. We as placemakers, are the facilitators and catalysts in the process.
What drives us in placemaking is the question: how do we use space to give people a chance in life?
“How do we use space to give people a chance in life?”
“You have to tune into what they’re saying”
How does this work in practice?
A lot of what we do today is in stakeholder alignment and consultation.
The concept of consultation in this part of the world is very different from the UK. In the UK, it’s part of legislation that you must consult. In Asia, some governments are taking a lead in consulting the public for their policies and projects, but public engagement for privately-led projects is still rare.
We see ourselves as the creative engine that translates any differences into design opportunities. You have to create buy-in with the government, with the authorities, with the developers, and with other stakeholders for a consensual outcome. This comes from our years of experience working in the fields of architecture and urban planning, which trains us as good generalists, as well as our stringent methodology and professional facilitation skills.
In one day, you could be talking in the morning to members of the community, and you need to get their buy-in. You have to show that you understand what they’re talking about, without promising certain things. Then, after lunch, you’ll need to bring that understanding into a meeting with a government agency, and present it at a level that aligns with their internal considerations and concerns.
Ultimately, we’re trying to build consensus. It’s never going to be easy, so you need a lot of time and effort to build the trust. A lot of persuasion.
What are your hopes for Rhindon in the future?
We’ve tried to broaden out what we can do, not only looking at public spaces, but also looking at organisations in general. Instead of just looking bottom-up, we view our work as stakeholder alignment, may it be external or internal. Instead of looking upward, we look at stakeholder alignment as a process – working with people at all levels.
For example, one of our recent projects was for the National Heritage Board. It was a narrative planning project for the Kampong Gelam community. Kampong means ‘village’ in Malay, and Gelam is a type of tree.
The objective of the project was to document the stories of all the heritage businesses in the area, and to align a narrative for the future of the neighbourhood. So, we ran a series of focus groups and training workshops to help document the stories. We got heritage businesses to tell their stories, and we trained public volunteers as the interviewer to document these stories with our guidance, so they can take ownership of the narrative themselves.
The Kampong Gelam project was my favourite project to date. That’s because of the huge complexity of local issues, as well as treasures, on the ground in relation to this heritage precinct. It’s an important part of Singapore. The whole process was to get people together, identify the challenges, and define the key design opportunities for everyone.
Now, what we do at Rhindon is focus on the methodology, and focus on aligning the many stakeholders.
Although we’re now a lot more organisational, our process is exactly the same: it’s all about empathy.
This means we can apply our processes to a variety of projects. Placemaking is one of our specialisms, and that’s part of our wider commitment to strategy design and stakeholder alignment – but this is always applied through empathy.
Having grown up in Hong Kong and studied in London, Billy Kwan is a trained urban planner. Besides co-founding Rhindon in Singapore, he is an Associate Lecturer at the Singapore University of Social Sciences and the Singapore Director for Brock Carmichael Asia.
