Talks on Tap #4 - Belonging & Placemaking with Felicity Chan & Stella Gwee
🍻 Talks on Tap #4
Urban Belonging & Placemaking with Felicity Hwee-Hwa Chan and Stella Gwee
As Singapore’s heartlands undergo widespread redevelopment, residents often face the loss of familiar places, routines, and social ties. While urban renewal promises improved living conditions, it can also disrupt people’s sense of belonging and attachment to their neighbourhoods. There is a need to better understand how residents experience and adapt to these changes, and how planning and design can support emotional, social, and cultural continuity in the heartlands.
This conversation between Felicity Chan and Stella Gwee explores how people experience belonging as Singapore’s heartlands change, focusing on everyday life at the neighbourhood level. As older estates are renewed and rebuilt, familiar places, routines, and relationships in the heartlands are often disrupted. Through residents’ stories and simple mapping of how they see their neighbourhoods, the session looks at how people hold on to a sense of “home” amid change—and what this means for how we design and plan the heartlands in the future.
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🎤 Featured Speakers
Felicity Hwee-Hwa Chan is an urban planner, designer, and social researcher whose work focuses on demographic diversification, inter-group relations, belonging, and public space design. She combines ethnography, interviews, surveys, and mapping to generate socio-spatial insights that can inform inclusive public policies, urban planning and design. She fell in love with the idea of urban planning in junior college and decided to try out physical planning at the Urban Redevelopment Authority of Singapore as her first job after college. She has worked as a planner and an academic in public and non-profit sectors. In January 2026, she started Topo-phi to further the leads and translate the findings that have emerged from her research project Mapping Urban Belonging in Places of Flux into practical insights to plan and design cities for belonging. She is the author of Tensions in Diversity: Spaces for Collective Life in Los Angeles published by the University of Toronto Press.
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Stella Gwee is the Founder of Shophouse & Co, a creative placemaking studio that transforms urban spaces into vibrant, community-centric places. Believing that culture and creativity are a city’s lifeblood, Stella is also a Regional Network Leader for Asia with PlacemakingX, a global network of placemaking leaders dedicated to creating inclusive, beloved communities.
Her entrepreneurial approach has earned international recognition in magazines such as Monocle, The Peak, etc and finalist spots for the Ashoka Changemakers and Women Leading Change Awards. An avid traveller passionate about design and culture, Stella is committed to empowering communities to turn breakthrough ideas into impactful reality.
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🗓️ 29 Jan (Thu), 𝟕𝐏𝐌
📍Yeast Side - Sourdough Pizza & Craft Beer @Farrer Park
2 Perumal Rd, #01-06, Singapore 218773
🎟️ $20 per pax (inclusive of a choice of alcoholic or nonalcholic beverage)
❗️ For payment, please click on “event terms” in the sign up form to access the QR code for PayNow!
The fee helps to cover venue hire and to support a local business. ✨ We want everyone to feel welcome so if the fee is a barrier, just drop us a note at [email protected] and we'll make it work.
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🗓️ Programme Rundown
7PM - Doors Open
7:20PM - Introductions
7:30PM - Talks
7:50PM - Moderated Panel & Q&A
8:30PM - Audience Segment
8:40PM - Mingle and hangout 🕺
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Accessibility Note: The space is wheelchair accessible and there are toilets available.