Research Projects

The Present and Future of Urban Design: A View from Asia (FUDA) examines how contemporary urban design theory and practice in Asia are shaping and potentially reorienting the discipline. Through the study of built and unbuilt projects across the region, the project documents current design approaches and identifies emerging directions for urban design. FUDA addresses persistent Western biases in disciplinary discourse by engaging Asia as a site of conceptual, methodological, and theoretical development rather than as a source of empirical cases alone. The project will result in a reference publication offering practice-oriented insights into methods, tools, and pedagogical approaches relevant to designers, planners, and educators. 

PI: Naomi C. HANAKATA (NUS)

Duration: 2026-2027

The proposed research has three sets of aims: to estimate fatality risk from coastal flooding and flood risk tolerance among individuals in Singapore, to develop a coastal flood protection design standard; to refine the methodology for cost and benefit assessment of coastal flood protection measures (CPMs); and to develop a method and matrix for the selection of CPMs in planning which takes into account resilience attributes of alternative measures, using an optimization approach. The three sets of aims will be pursued using different and complementary methods, employing the building blocks of a common catalogue of CPMs and a typology of coastal (land and marine) environments which will also be developed under the project. Public risk attitudes will be investigated using quantitative analysis of survey and experimental data. The cost-benefit analysis method and the multi-criteria optimization approach and matrix will primarily involve conceptual work, and their use will be demonstrated for selected CPMs representing existing and innovative CPMs. The method and matrix will be of direct value to planners, while the individual and societal risk tolerance and mortality parameters can be included in the planning matrix to deliver more complete evaluation of alternative CPMs.

Lead PI: Olivia JENSEN (NUS)

Team PI: Naomi C. HANAKATA (NUS), Vincent GAN (NUS)

Co-I: Xiaobo LI (NUS), Dorothy TANG (NUS)

Funding: Coastal Protection and Flood Management Research Programme (CFRP), PUB

Duration: 2025-2028

The Digital Asia Collaboratory at NUS’s Asia Research Institute (ARI) investigates how digital platforms are reshaping urban space, governance, and citizenship across Asia. Bringing together an international team of scholars, the collaboratory examines the material and spatial implications of platform infrastructures—from data centers and distribution networks to everyday practices of platform use. By focusing on Asia’s diverse contexts, it highlights how global digital transformations intersect with local conditions, producing new territorial relations, inequalities, and opportunities. The collaboratory advances critical and comparative debates on digitization and the challenges and opportunities for the ‘physical city’ in the process.  

PI: Naomi C. HANAKATA (NUS)

Funding: Asia Research Institute, NUS

Duration: 2025-2026

The project explores the transformative impact of digital platforms on urban environments and contemporary notions of citizenship, examining how the integration of platforms into urban infrastructure reshapes spatial, social, and political dynamics within cities. By analyzing the interplay between technology, governance, and everyday urban life, the research highlights how platformization challenges traditional understandings of public space, civic participation, and citizen rights. Through interdisciplinary inquiry, the project contributes to critical debates on urban transformation in the digital age. 

PI: Naomi C. HANAKATA (NUS), Filippo BIGNAMI (SUPSI)

Funding: Leading House Asia, ETH Zurich

Duration: 2024-2025

This research aims to develop a robust strategy for adaptive planning for the long-term development of urban areas. It specifically addresses the challenges of urban, coastal zones by considering the multi-stressors and dynamic conditions this area is characterised by. The proposal transgresses conventional planning by making time a key planning parameter allowing to incorporate uncertainties into the planning process and the possibilities for multiple, optimal outcomes. 

PI: Naomi C. HANAKATA (NUS)

Collaborators: Xiaobo LI (NUS), Dorothy TANG (NUS), Guoqing GENG (NUS), Yuzhu LI(NUS), Vincent GAN (NUS)

Funding: Ministry of Education

Duration: 2024-2026

This project seeks to explore the potentials and implications of the renewable energy transition in Southeast Asia by studying the role of Singapore in this process. It takes renewable energy (production) as lens to investigate the relationship between extended urban regions as productive territories and urban centralities as sites of consumption and control and the (newly emerging) topologies of social just implications. It takes the conceptualisation of extended and concentrated urban territories as a framework to analyse the implications of the energy transition in the context of contemporary urbanization processes, ultimately studied through and from diverse urban conditions. 

PI: Naomi C. HANAKATA (NUS)

Collaborators: Filip BIJIECKI (NUS), Hiromi INAGAKI (SEC). 

Funding: Humanities and Social Sciences Seed Grant, Singapore

Duration: 2024-2025

This project through a workshop aims to gather selected scholars working in the field of urban studies and at the intersection of social, political and technical disciplines, to discuss and elaborate upon the process of digital platformization in urban areas. It aims at focus on both online and offline processes, to further our understanding of changing citizenship conceptions and to generate a shared methodological approach to address the virtual and physical processes defining platform urbanization. More specifically, the workshop delves into the intersection between three dimensions, namely: the urban as an environment with material and immaterial dimension; its urban governance and means of regulation and control; citizenship and related rights, duties, practices and modes of participation.  

Co-PIs: Naomi C. HANAKATA (NUS), Filippo BIGNAMI (SUPSI)

Funding: Swiss National Science Foundation

Duration: 2023

Highlights:

• [PUBLICATION] Hanakata, Naomi C., and Filippo Bignami. 2023. "Platform Urbanization, its recent acceleration, and implications on citizenship. The case of Singapore." Citizenship Studies. 

• [PUBLICATION] Hanakata, Naomi C. and Filippo Bignami. 2023. “When Platforms Meet Citizens: Patterns of Platform Urbanization and Its Uneven Performance.” Paper presented at the Cities and Human Mobility Research Collaborative – Vienna Research Symposium, IWM, Vienna.

What is the future of the manifold agricultural territories across the world that support contemporary cities? While discussions on urban sustainability have focused on cities and urban regions, many agricultural territories are equally exposed to rapid and far-reaching urban transformation processes with massive social and environmental implications, opening a research gap for ‘agri-urbanisms’.

The New Urban Agendas under Planetary Urbanisation module aims to address the gap by analysing selected processes of ‘extended urbanisation’ in agricultural territories across Europe and Asia in three typical forms of extended urbanisation: 1) operationalised landscapes of industrial agriculture; 2) peripheralised mountain regions; and 3) enclosed and fragmented agricultural landscapes in extended metropolitan regions.

Co-PI: Naomi C. HANAKATA (NUS),

FCL Co-PIs: Christian SCHMID (ETHZ), Milica TOPALOVIC (ETHZ) 

Collaborators: Adrienne GRÊT-​REGAMEY (ETHZ), Johan SIX (USYS), Christoph Kueffer (ETHZ)

Funding: Future Cities Laboratory Global

Duration: 2021-2025

Highlights: 

• [DESIGN] Hanakata, N. C., Topalovic, M., & Schmid, C. (2024). Urbanisation Processes in Agrarian Territories. Singapore.

• [DESIGN] Hanakata, N. C., Schmid, C., & Topalovic, M. (2023). Urbanisation Processes in Agrarian Territories. Zurich.

This project investigates the challenges and opportunities of integrating renewable energy production into high-density urban areas and bringing sites of energy production and consumption spatially closer together.

This localisation of energy production can facilitate a reduction of a city’s energy and carbon footprint, an increasing resilience towards external shocks global networks are exposed to, but also a growing awareness for energy consumption, leveraging on new technologies, and a new, integrated planning approach.

PI: Naomi C. HANAKATA (NUS)

Funding: NUS

Duration: 2021-2025

Project TOT City - Tokyo Olympics 2020: Transformations, City and Citizenship - explores how Tokyo's hosting of the 2020 Olympics catalyzed shifts in urban infrastructure and civic identity. This multilateral project pursues the question of how the Olympic Games impacted Tokyo neighbourhood dynamics and the urban metropolitan region and contributes towards the understanding of social, political, and economic transformations within the urban context. By analyzing the Tokyo 2020 Games, the project aims to provide insights into the broader implications of hosting such events on city dynamics and citizenship. 

Co-PIs: Naomi C. HANAKATA (NUS), Filippo BIGNAMI (SUPSI)

Funding: Swiss Network for International Studies (SNIS)

Duration: 2019-2021