Can Public Space System Functions Succeed Across Boundaries? A Comparative Study of the Urban Planning Practices in Suzhou Industrial Park and Singapore

Since the 1960s, Singapore's Housing and Development Board (HDB) has gradually established a comprehensive, hierarchical planning system for housing and public space in high-density residential areas. In the late 1990s, Suzhou Industrial Park (SIP) began to draw on Singapore's planning experience, absorbed certain planning concepts, and attempted to build up its urban model in China. The spatial practice and conceptual translation from Singapore to the SIP warrants reflection on the differences and issues in the two planning and urban management contexts. This article first investigates the issues in that translation when the planning concepts in Singapore (e.g. neighbourhood and precinct) were translated into Chinese planning contexts, in which some translations were made based on literal meanings without intricate mapping from one context to the other. Through fieldwork and policy mapping between the two places, the research further highlights the precincts and gated communities that have been neglected in comparing the two systems as an essential urban unit in making the spatial ductility and urban connectivity of public spaces in the hierarchy of Singapore difficult to achieve in the SIP. The investigation into the neighbourhood centres and void deck spaces in the SIP as transferable concepts from Singapore also found that more large-scale, multifunctional, centralised small shopping malls have been increasingly planned in recent years, such that everyday public spaces close to ordinary life are in danger of shrinkage. This article points out the trend for constructing centralised neighbourhood centres should be revisited, and the priority should be made to create a fluid urban system with public spaces connecting to each other.