Co-located community hubs are reshaping how Singapore delivers community life. By bringing diverse services, amenities, and activities together in one place, hubs such as Our Tampines Hub, Heartbeat@Bedok, Kampong Admiralty, Wisma Geylang Serai, Bukit Canberra, and One Punggol make efficient use of scarce land while serving as focal points for social interaction, community engagement, access to essential services, and resource sharing. With more under construction, they are fast becoming a defining feature of the city. But how these hubs contribute to social capital – the networks, trust, and mutual support that underpin community cohesion and resilience – remains poorly understood. To plan hubs that deliver on their social promise, we need to know how people actually use them, and what that use means for community life.

This project sets out to understand how co-located community hubs build social capital and community capacities. We ask who uses these hubs, how they are used, and how their design and programming shape interaction, trust, and belonging – and, in turn, residents’ social health and wellbeing. The study takes a mixed-methods approach. We audit hub environments and conduct structured observations of how people use them across times of day and days of the week, recorded through a purpose-built web app developed internally by the team. These are complemented by street intercept surveys with hub visitors and a nationwide online survey capturing usage patterns, perceptions, neighbourhood context, and social health and wellbeing. Together, these insights will inform practical strategies for designing and programming future hubs that are not only well-located and well-used, but socially connected.

The project is a collaboration between the Urban Psychology Lab in LKYCIC and the Saw Swee Hock School of Public Health, NUS.

Reach the team directly at co_hubs@sutd.edu.sg.