Assessing social equity factors and dwellers' desirability perception of compact city centre residing

Abstract

During the past three decades, the rapid pace of globalisation and economic restructuring has resulted in South-East Asian city-regions receiving the unanticipated urbanisation pressures. In order to control and decrease the impact of urbanisation pressures on city living, the government in Singapore has advocated growth management approaches giving particular interest to urban sustainability. Since, many researchers claimed of the social and environmental beneficial effects of high density compact city living, such as social equity. This paper aims to obtain the dwellers' perception desirability of the Singapore Compact City residing and probe the potential cost and benefits of compact development, which may be delivered by social and spatial aspects of the compactness to inspect the validity of assertions that the compact city promotes social equity. Research outcomes indicated that although compactness concept is associated with some negative impacts, it seems to be positive for some aspects of social fairness and this model was desirable, and accepted by the majority of dwellers who reside in the city centre.