Civic Resilience Laboratory

ABOUT / PEOPLE Research Assistant Research Assistant at CiRe, NUS Department of Architecture febriani.valentina113@gmail.com Department of Architecture, College of Design and Engineering, National University of Singapore, 4 Architecture Drive, Singapore 117566 Febriani Valentina BR Sihombing has interdisciplinary backgrounds in architecture and tourism planning. Her work focuses on participatory planning, sustainable development, and climate resilience through…

ABOUT / PEOPLE Research Assistant Research Assistant at CiRe, NUS Department of Architecture sallomitaf@gmail.com Department of Architecture, College of Design and Engineering, National University of Singapore, 4 Architecture Drive, Singapore 117566 Sallomita Febrina Kurniawan is a Research Assistant and an Architecture graduate from Universitas Atma Jaya Yogyakarta, Indonesia. Her research explores the intersection of artificial intelligence…

MESSY RESILIENT? / SPEAKERS Discussant National Taiwan University 4700 Keele St, North York, ON M3J 1P3, Canada Bio: Shu-Mei Huang is the Director and Professor at the Graduate Institute of Building and Planning, National Taiwan University. Her research area intersects Urban and Regional Planning, Heritage Studies, Indigenous Studies in East Asia. Huang led in an…

MESSY RESILIENT? / SPEAKERS Keynote Speaker York University 4700 Keele St, North York, ON M3J 1P3, Canada Keynote Speech: Interstitial Urbanism: Politics, History, & Culture One of the main (and relatively permanent) features of Southeast Asian cities is a variety of interstitial spaces that exists within a formal city as well as at the peri-urban…

MESSY RESILIENT? / SPEAKERS Presenter Universitas Indonesia Instagram; X Jl. Lingkar, Pondok Cina, Kecamatan Beji, Kota Depok, Jawa Barat 16424, Indonesia Presentation: Claiming Interstitial Spaces: Interrogating dwelling / working places through the struggle of Rasdullah This project will examine the spatial trajectories of Jakarta’s rickshaw (becak) drivers to unveil their everyday spatial practices, both dwelling/working…

MESSY RESILIENT? / SPEAKERS Presenter Professor, University of Technology, Sydney LinkedIn 15 Broadway, Ultimo NSW 2007, Australia Presentation: Urban Liminality, Resilience and Becoming: Migrant Volleyball in Singapore’s Interstitial Urbanism Every Sunday, a forgotten pocket of vacant land at Old Terminal Lane in Kallang transforms into a vibrant hub we call the ‘volleyball scene’.  Up to…

MESSY RESILIENT? / SPEAKERS Presenter Associate Professor, Macquarie Univesity Balaclava Rd, Macquarie Park NSW 2113, Australia Presentation: Urban Liminality, Resilience and Becoming: Migrant Volleyball in Singapore’s Interstitial Urbanism Every Sunday, a forgotten pocket of vacant land at Old Terminal Lane in Kallang transforms into a vibrant hub we call the ‘volleyball scene’.  Up to 200…

MESSY RESILIENT? / SPEAKERS Discussant Assistant Professor, National University of Singapore 4 Architecture Dr, #03-01, Singapore 117566 Bio: Dorothy Tang, PhD, is a landscape architect and assistant professor in the Department of Architecture at the National University of Singapore. Her research and practice is concerned with the intersections of infrastructure and everyday life, especially in…

MESSY RESILIENT? / SPEAKERS Discussant Visiting Associate Professor, National University of Singapore 4 Architecture Dr, #03-01, Singapore 117566 Bio: Jayde Lin Roberts, Visiting Associate Professor in the Department of Architecture at the National University of Singapore, is an interdisciplinary scholar who combines spatial and historical analysis with ethnographic research to examine heritage-making, urban informality, and…

MESSY RESILIENT? / SPEAKERS Presenter Program Coordinator, Bedar Social Development Group Presentation: Resilience as Revolution: Subaltern Agency among the Urban Poor and Disenfranchised If resilience is the ability to absorb disturbances such as floods, fires, and coup d’états while maintaining a system’s essential functions, structure and identity, the struggles of Yangon’s Urban Poor Network (UPN)…

MESSY RESILIENT? / SPEAKERS Presenter Community Organizer, Program Coordinator, Bedar Social Development Group Presentation: Resilience as Revolution: Subaltern Agency among the Urban Poor and Disenfranchised If resilience is the ability to absorb disturbances such as floods, fires, and coup d’états while maintaining a system’s essential functions, structure and identity, the struggles of Yangon’s Urban Poor…

MESSY RESILIENT? / SPEAKERS Presenter Community Architect, Bedar Social Development Group Presentation: Resilience as Revolution: Subaltern Agency among the Urban Poor and Disenfranchised If resilience is the ability to absorb disturbances such as floods, fires, and coup d’états while maintaining a system’s essential functions, structure and identity, the struggles of Yangon’s Urban Poor Network (UPN)…

MESSY RESILIENT? / SPEAKERS Presenter Professor, Tohoku University; International Research Institute of Disaster Science (IRIDeS) LinkedIn 2 Chome-1-1 Katahira, Aoba Ward, Sendai, Miyagi 980-8577, Japan Presentation: Dirt-y resilience: growing from the ground up after Japan’s 3.11 disaster In response to massive damage caused by the 3.11 Great East Japan Earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disaster on…

MESSY RESILIENT? / SPEAKERS Presenter Associate Professor, University of Southern California; Spatial Analysis Lab Instagram Los Angeles, CA 90007, United States Presentation: Resilient Urban Data of Third Spaces As cities and urban regions face a myriad of challenges, community bonds are a major civic resource to face them. Even in our digital world, these communities…

MESSY RESILIENT? / SPEAKERS Presenter Lecturer, University of Economics Ho Chi Minh City; Institute of Smart City & Management LinkedIn 59C Nguyễn Đình Chiểu, Xuân Hòa, Hồ Chí Minh 70000, Vietnam Presentation: From Local Knowledge to Climate Action: Lessons from Participatory Planning in Vietnam As cities across Southeast Asia face increasing climate risks, planning processes…

MESSY RESILIENT? / SPEAKERS Presenter PhD Student, The University of Tokyo Facebook 7 Chome-3-1 Hongo, Bunkyo City, Tokyo 113-8654, Japan Presentation: Mapping Unevenness—How the Material Infrastructure of Water Shapes Post-Disaster Communities in Tacloban City, Philippines “This study aims to explain how the uneven distribution of water supply facilitates residents’ adaptive strategies in post-disaster resettlement communities.…

MESSY RESILIENT? / SPEAKERS Presenter Professor of Urban Design & Planning, College of Built Environments, University of Washington, Seattle 1410 NE Campus Pkwy, Seattle, WA 98195, United States Presentation: Messy Urbanism 2.0: Urban Informality as Resilience in Seattle, WA Cities worldwide exhibit distinctive self-organizing patterns of informal urbanism that both predate and persist alongside the…

MESSY RESILIENT? / SPEAKERS Presenter Associate Professor, University of Washington, Seattle Instagram Parkville VIC 3010, Australia Presentation: From Redlining to Resilience: The Nehemiah Initiative and the Politics of Interstitial Adaptation in Seattle This presentation examines Seattle’s Nehemiah Initiative (NI) through the lens of “”messy-resilient”” urbanism — asking how community-based, bottom-up initiatives operate in the interstitial…

MESSY RESILIENT? / SPEAKERS Presenter Associate Professor in Urban Planning, University of Melbourne Parkville VIC 3010, Australia Presentation: Messy islandness in the context of a changing climate: A feminist exploration of Dawahon (Leyte, Philippines) Dawahon island is a high density floating barangay1 in the Philippines. A five hectare land mass that is home to 4,000…

MESSY RESILIENT? / SPEAKERS Presenter Professor, University of Technology Sydney LinkedIn 15 Broadway, Ultimo NSW 2007, Australia Presentation: Urban Liminality, Resilience and Becoming: Migrant Volleyball in Singapore’s Interstitial Urbanism Every Sunday, a forgotten pocket of vacant land at Old Terminal Lane in Kallang transforms into a vibrant hub we call the ‘volleyball scene’.  Up to…

MESSY RESILIENT? / SPEAKERS Presenter Assistant Professor, National University of Singapore; Co-Director, Civic Resilience Laboratory 4 Architecture Dr, #03-01, Singapore 117566 Presentation: Messy Knowledge, Ordered Infrastructure: Community Climate Adaptation on Semarang’s Coast Indonesia’s coastal communities face compounded risks from sea level rise, ground subsidence, coastal abrasion, and intensifying floods. Yet, the embodied environmental knowledge of…

MESSY RESILIENT? / SPEAKERS Presenter Associate Professor, University of Washington 1410 NE Campus Pkwy, Seattle, WA 98195, United States Presentation: Panarchic Planning: How Place-based Communities Contribute to Social-Ecological Resilience Across Scales The concept of Panarchy (Gunderson and Holling 2002) describes resilience in complex social-ecological systems as a non-linear, cyclical, and continuous process of adaptation and…

NEWS / MESSY RESILIENT? Workshop 20-22 September 2026 Department of Architecture, 4 Architecture Dr, #03-01, Singapore 117566, National University of Singapore Workshop Convener: Jeff HOU jhou@nus.edu.sg Research Assistant: CHEE Qian Ning qianning.c@nus.edu.sg EVENT HOMEPAGE EVENT PROGRAMME Daniel B. ABRAMSON Presenter • Panarchic Planning: How Place-based Communities Contribute to Social-Ecological Resilience Across Scales University of Washington…

NEWS / MESSY RESILIENT? Workshop 20-22 September 2026 Department of Architecture, 4 Architecture Dr, #03-01, Singapore 117566, National University of Singapore Workshop Convener: Jeff HOU jhou@nus.edu.sg Research Assistant: CHEE Qian Ning qianning.c@nus.edu.sg EVENT HOMEPAGE EVENT SPEAKERS Pre-workshop Site Visits (20 September) Ground-Up Initiative Migrant Volleyball Scene in Kallang Schedule to be determined Day 1: Welcome…

ABOUT / PEOPLE Research Assistant Research Assistant at NUS Department of Architecture jamieloh@u.nus.edu Department of Architecture, College of Design and Engineering, National University of Singapore, 4 Architecture Drive, Singapore 117566 Jamie Loh is a Research Assistant at CiRe. Her work engages proximity design and the conditions that enable neighbourhood systems to thrive, exploring how design mediates…

ABOUT / PEOPLE Research Fellow Research Fellow at NUS Department of Architecture emilysoh@nus.edu.sg Department of Architecture, College of Design and Engineering, National University of Singapore, 4 Architecture Drive, Singapore 117566 Dr Emily Soh is a Research Fellow at the Department of Architecture at the National University of Singapore. She received her PhD (D.Phil in Urban…

ABOUT / PEOPLE Research Assistant Research Assistant at CiRe, NUS Department of Architecture vincentjulijanto@u.nus.edu Department of Architecture, College of Design and Engineering, National University of Singapore, 4 Architecture Drive, Singapore 117566 Vincent is a Computer Science undergraduate at the National University of Singapore with a strong interest in applying AI and data-driven approaches to real-world…

ABOUT / PEOPLE Research Assistant Research Assistant at CiRe, NUS Department of Architecture faiz.krisnadi@u.nus.edu Department of Architecture, College of Design and Engineering, National University of Singapore, 4 Architecture Drive, Singapore 117566 Faiz is a Master’s candidate in International Affairs at NUS Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy. His work examines how data, technologies, and mixed-methods…

ABOUT / PEOPLE Research Assistant Research Assistant at CiRe, NUS Department of Architecture e1553695@u.nus.edu Department of Architecture, College of Design and Engineering, National University of Singapore, 4 Architecture Drive, Singapore 117566 Shreya is a Master of Urban Planning (MUP) student at the National University of Singapore, with a background in architecture. Her work explores data-driven…

ABOUT / PEOPLE Research Assistant Research Assistant at CiRe, NUS Department of Architecture zheng_zeqi@u.nus.edu Department of Architecture, College of Design and Engineering, National University of Singapore, 4 Architecture Drive, Singapore 117566 Zeqi is a Master’s student in Urban Design and a part-time research assistant in the Department of Architecture at the National University of Singapore.…

ABOUT / PEOPLE Research Assistant Research Assistant at CiRe, NUS Department of Architecture e1350830@u.nus.edu Department of Architecture, College of Design and Engineering, National University of Singapore, 4 Architecture Drive, Singapore 117566 Jingyi is an urban planner and researcher with a background in Urban Planning (MUP, National University of Singapore) and Landscape Architecture (Zhejiang University). His…

ABOUT / PEOPLE Research Assistant Research Assistant at CiRe, NUS Department of Architecture shobhit.goel@u.nus.edu Department of Architecture, College of Design and Engineering, National University of Singapore, 4 Architecture Drive, Singapore 117566 Shobhit is an undergraduate researcher at the National University of Singapore, working at the intersection of AI, computer vision, and urban analytics. At the…

ABOUT / PEOPLE PhD Student PhD Student at CiRe, NUS Department of Architecture e1350395@u.nus.edu Department of Architecture, College of Design and Engineering, National University of Singapore, 4 Architecture Drive, Singapore 117566 Xinyi is a PhD Student in the NUS Department of Architecture. Her current projects include: (1) displacement of the informal economy in Asian cities…

ABOUT / PEOPLE Research Assistant Research Assistant at CiRe, NUS Department of Architecture wenhao.chen@u.nus.edu Department of Architecture, College of Design and Engineering, National University of Singapore, 4 Architecture Drive, Singapore 117566 Wenhao is a M.Sc. student studying Engineering Design and Innovation. He holds the Bachelor of Engineering in Computer Science. His main interest covers the…

ABOUT / PEOPLE Research Assistant Research Assistant at CiRe, NUS Department of Architecture qianning.c@nus.edu.sg Department of Architecture, College of Design and Engineering, National University of Singapore, 4 Architecture Drive, Singapore 117566 Qian Ning is a Research Assistant at the Department of Architecture, National University of Singapore. With a background in Law (LLB) and Arts and Cultural…

ABOUT / PEOPLE Research Assistant Research Assistant at CiRe, NUS Department of Architecture parisenbiswas@nus.edu.sg Department of Architecture, College of Design and Engineering, National University of Singapore, 4 Architecture Drive, Singapore 117566 Pari is a full-time Research Assistant at the CiRe. Her work engages the politics of urban development, smart citizenship, and climate governance in Asia.…

ABOUT / PEOPLE PhD Student PhD Student at CiRe, NUS Department of Architecture liangwanching@u.nus.edu Department of Architecture, College of Design and Engineering, National University of Singapore, 4 Architecture Drive, Singapore 117566 Wan Ching is a PhD Student from Taiwan at the Department of Architecture, NUS. She holds a multidisciplinary background in anthropology and architecture. Her…

ABOUT / PEOPLE PhD Student PhD Student at CiRe, NUS Department of Architecture e1583378@u.nus.edu Department of Architecture, College of Design and Engineering, National University of Singapore, 4 Architecture Drive, Singapore 117566 Yi Lin is a PhD Student at the Department of Architecture, National University of Singapore. Drawing from nearly two decades in Singapore’s Public Service,…

ABOUT / PEOPLE PhD Student PhD Student at CiRe, NUS Department of Architecture nguyendangdao137@gmail.com Department of Architecture, College of Design and Engineering, National University of Singapore, 4 Architecture Drive, Singapore 117566 Dao is a PhD Student at the Department of Architecture, National University of Singapore, under the ASEAN Graduate Scholarship. His research focuses on participatory…

ABOUT / PEOPLE PhD Student PhD Student at CiRe, NUS Department of Architecture guanhong.li@u.nus.edu Department of Architecture, College of Design and Engineering, National University of Singapore, 4 Architecture Drive, Singapore 117566 With professional training in urban design (Huaqiao University) and landscape urbanism (Architectural Association), Guanhong is pursuing research at NUS that bridges digital‑twin technologies and critical…

ABOUT / PEOPLE PhD Student PhD Student at CiRe, NUS Department of Architecture e1583501@u.nus.edu Department of Architecture, College of Design and Engineering, National University of Singapore, 4 Architecture Drive, Singapore 117566 Chu Ngoc Huyen is a PhD Student at the Department of Architecture, National University of Singapore. She holds a Master’s degree in Building Architecture from Politecnico di…

ABOUT / PEOPLE / Co-Directors Co-Director Professor, Provost’s Chair, and Head of Department, NUS Department of Architecture. Founder of the Urban Commons Laboratory, University of Washington. jhou@nus.edu.sg Department of Architecture, College of Design and Engineering, National University of Singapore, 4 Architecture Drive, Singapore 117566 In a career that spans the Pacific, Professor Jeff Hou has…

ABOUT / PEOPLE / Co-Directors Co-Director Assistant Professor at NUS Department of Architecture c.ahn@nus.edu.sg Department of Architecture, College of Design and Engineering, National University of Singapore, 4 Architecture Drive, Singapore 117566 Assistant Professor Chaewon Ahn is an urban researcher who studies the relationship between social systems and the built environment using urban data and analytical…