Rissa Ho | Urban Planning Portfolio

Rissa Ho Mei Yi URBAN PLANNING | DESIGN

PORTFOLIO 2021-2023

Contents 1.

Marketplace @ Woodlands A g r i - F o o d T r ad e H u b | U r b an A n al y s i s S t u d i o

2.

Oasis of the West W a t e r f r o n t D i s t r i c t | U r b an De s i g n S t u d i o

3.

Liveable one-north I n n o v a t i o n D i s t r i c t | U r b an an d R e g i o n al P l an n i n g S t u d i o

4.

*SCAPE S p a c e S y n t ax An al y s i s | M i x e d U s e F i n al A s s i g n m e nt

5.

PLAB Redesign A i r B a s e R e d e s i g n | I n t e g r at e d P l an n i n g P r o j e c t

6.

Personal Interests Pottery, Sketching, Blind Contours

AGRI-FOOD TRADE HUB

01

Marketplace @ Woodlands COURSE

Urban and Regional Planning Studio, NUS

MEMBERS

Dennis Yeo, Lu Yan Ru, Rissa Ho, Su Kun

DATE

Fall 2022 - Spring 2023

SITE

Woodlands, Singapore

Woodlands is one of Singapore's oldest residential estates. Located along the northern coast of Singapore, it has the unique characteristic of being a border town to Malaysia, along the waterfront, and is positioned along the agri-tech and food corridor.

Singapore imports 90% of its food and is extremely vulnerable to disruptions in the food supply chain. As our demand for food increases, there is a need to rethink the way we secure our food.

Woodlands presents a strategic opportunity to further Singapore’s food security goals as an agrifood trade and distribution hub. Marketplace @ Woodlands is a masterplan proposal that aims to create an agri-food regional center through the creation of dynamic new experiences and forming a distinctly unique global food destination.

As my third studio project, I was actively involved in crafting the storyline for Woodland's positioning. I was pivotal in explaining our narrative, on which we based our premise of a marketplace concept. We worked together to transform this conceptual idea to a physical plan of 3 distinct marketplace typologies: experience, community and kampung. I helped to redesign the masterplan with team members while incorporating our various new land use models. Ultimately, we hope to form a visual connection between the existing regional center and the upcoming rail station connecting Singapore and Malaysia.

URBAN AND REGIONAL PLANNING STUDIO

Case Study Concept

Concept Diagram Land Use Plan

GPR

Logistics Network

Road Network

Green Network Hierarchy

Concept Plan

Land Use Models

WATERFRONT DISTRICT

02

Oasis of the West COURSE MEMBERS DATE SITE

Urban Design Studio, NUS Guo Si Chen, Joey Lim, Rissa Ho, Wang Ze Yu, Yin Wei Hong Spring 2022 Jurong East, Singapore

Jurong East has historically been an industrial port in the southwestern coast of Singapore. Amidst changing trends with COVID and developments to become a regional hub, we are tasked to develop a new position for the 14.8 sqkm site under the premise of planning a post-pandemic city of the future. Given the increasing importance of mental health and well-being in pandemic times, our group set to create an Oasis of the West — a waterfront sanctuary for people living and working in the west to rest, recharge and socialize.

We wanted to create a mixed-use district that created spaces of recreation, leisure and interaction. Using the waterfront both at the coast and the reservoir as our key recreation spaces, we concentrated high potential activity around these areas. Hierarchies of connection was also important, as we explored this through green connections and new forms of transportation. In this studio project, I played a major role in creating the conceptual diagrams, practiced urban design principles, designed road sections, and challenged and justified our ideas and designs to professors. Since the focus of this semester was on urban design, each of my group members were responsible for designing different sections of the district.

Concept Plan URBAN DESIGN STUDIO

Structural Plan

Massing

Urban Design

Masterplan

Right of Way

Residential

MICE

Transport-Oriented Development

MICE

Museum

Commercial

Building Typologies

Water Stage

Seafront Recreational Area

INNOVATION DISTRICT

SWOT Analysis

03

Liveable one-north COURSE MEMBERS

DATE SITE

Urban Analysis Studio, NUS Chen Yue Yi, Dennis Yeo, Mathieu Bubert, Rissa Ho, Yan Min Yu, Zhao Yu Xuan Fall 2021 one-north, Singapore

one-north is a leading innovation district in Singapore. Imagined thirty years ago and built ten years later by Zaha Hadid Architects and JTC, it is now struggling to find a path for the future.

Walking around the site today shows an evident lack of vibrancy and human interaction. Under the theme of sustainable urban intensification, we embarked on a masterplan re-imagination for the site. After thorough site analysis and case study research on other innovation districts, our team identified the lack of residential land use within the site as one of the key issues for the lack of creative and collaborative economy. With our vision “Liveable one-north”, we developed a masterplan to justify reducing some business land use to increase residential and mixed use land uses.

The focus of this studio was on urban analysis, hence much labour was put into conducting desktop research and GIS to come up with a comprehensive SWOT table. Once we had identified liveability as our key issue, my main role was to find comparative case studies on other innovation districts and to form a basis for the numbers suggested in our land use plan. I also assumed the role of project manager — whereby I led meetings, activated team members to contribute ideas, kept track of agenda items to complete before each meeting and intervened when communication broke down. Since communication and presenting are some of my strong suits, I helped to provide justifications for our masterplan intervention, wrote policy statements; and outlined the general skeleton of our final crit, to make sure that the flow of our presentation was cohesive.

URBAN ANALYSIS STUDIO

Case Study and Housing Number Rationale

Land Use Plan and Policy Statements

Master Plan

SPONTANEITY IN PUBLIC SPACES

Macro Analysis

04

*SCAPE COURSE

Mixed Use | Mixed Users, NUS

MEMBERS

Max Lalande, Mathieu Bubert, Rissa Ho, Wang Yi Wen, Wong Min Hui, Yumin Ooi

DATE

Fall 2022

SITE

Orchard *SCAPE, Singapore

Mixed-use buildings are essential to the experience of the city, but mixed-uses also involve mixed-users and differing user needs. In this group project, we selected youth hub *SCAPE as our case study to understand how different user groups navigate their environment. While many shops have vacated level 1-3 of *SCAPE in the demise of COVID, level 4 and 5 have become spaces that encourage spontaneous activity such as dancing, playing instruments and even cat-walking. In the wake of statements released about plans to revamp the space to look more like a typical mall, we wondered how this might present a threat to the current spontaneity that the space encourages.

We set out to research what are the factors that contribute to the level of spontaneity we see at *SCAPE. We did this on two levels: from an urban scale, we want to investigate how the location and context of *SCAPE has enabled it to function differently from other mixed-use buildings and retained a level of self-regulation; from a micro scale, we want to experiment with how the newly revamped *SCAPE might hinder some of the spontaneity we currently see on site, a critical element of a youth space.

For the Macro analysis, we used space syntax analysis through looking at mean step depth, connectivity, and visibility to understand *SCAPE's location relative to its surrounding buildings. For the Micro analysis, site visits, VR experiment and surveys were conducted to understand user habits and preferences. My role for the group project looked like helping to conduct space syntax research using Isovists and DepthMap software, as well as conducting the site visit and user surveys.

MIXED USE | MIXED USERS

Micro Analysis

AIRBASE REDESIGN

05

PLAB Redesign Land Use Analysis COURSE

Economic Analysis

Planning Process and Policy Lab, NUS

DATE

Fall 2021

SITE

Paya Lebar Planning Area, Singapore

This lab assignment was an exercise in the process of physical planning. As such, the final outcome was not as important as practicing the process. Set on the premise that Paya Lebar Airbase will be relocated in 2030, we were tasked to do an analysis and proposal for Paya Lebar Planning Area. This first entailed doing a comprehensive and thorough analysis on land use, demographic, housing, economic, cost-benefit and transportation systems.

Through the outcomes of these analyses, we were tasked to develop a simple planning vision and general structural plan for the planning area, providing justification for the placement of each land use type. My vision for the final masterplan of Paya Lebar was for it to be a regional hub with a distinctive local identity that encourages a symbiotic relationship between economy, neighbourhood and nature. Some notable design choices I made was to preserve the existing characteristics of the site — for example, keeping the runway to be converted into a commercial strip, while converting the airport control tower into an aerospace museum.

Improving green network was a key aspect of providing a connection between the natural spaces on the north-western corner and south-eastern corner of the site.

Transportation Analysis

Through this exercise, I learned the basic theory on how to conduct various analysis, and I found that reflecting the numbers from these findings into a physical plan was the most challenging part.

PLANNING PROCESS LAB

Final Land Use Plan

Housing Analysis

Residential

Industry

Green

Commercial

06

Personal Interests

Even before deciding to pursue urban planning, I have always been interested in art as a creative outlet.

Pottery Pottery has been significant player in teaching me about form and functionality. It has been instrumental in my journey of discovering urban planning: just as the form of a vessel influences the way we interact and engage with it, similarly the design of physical spaces have the ability to impact the way we construe meaning and develop affections towards it.

Sketching Sketching has allowed me to see the world differently. Over the years, it has taught me about proportions and scale, texture and shadows, allowed me to explore colours, and made me more observant of my surroundings. I also enjoy blind contour sketches (tracing contours without looking at my drawing) of friends and family, as it activates my right brain and teaches me to see things without first trying to make sense of them, but interpret it as it is.

END thank you