The Circle Line’s almost complete. Its walkways don’t have to be empty

The Straits Times, The Circle Line’s almost complete. Its walkways don’t have to be empty

By Assistant Professor Samuel Chng, LKYCIC

With new MRT stations opening and more train lines in the works, there’s an opportunity to transform their long underground walkways into more than just infrastructure.

It is a familiar journey for many of us in train stations across the island.

You get off the train, go up an escalator, tap out of the gantry and enter a long, air-conditioned underground corridor. They’re cool, clean, efficient – and sometimes, largely empty. Within minutes of arriving at your destination, you’ve probably forgotten them entirely.

We see them across MRT lines, from the Downtown Line, Thomson-East Coast Line and interchanges in stations like Orchard, City Hall and Marina Bay: The long walkways linking stations to malls, offices and surrounding neighbourhoods can stretch up to 400m and are becoming increasingly common as Singapore builds more MRT lines.

It was recently announced that the three remaining Circle Line stations – Cantonment, Prince Edward and Keppel – will open in July. With even more MRT stations and lines in the works, it’s worth asking the question: Can these long walkways become more than just infrastructure?

Underappreciated spaces

Public conversation about our shared spaces has lately focused on what is missing – benches, shade or places to sit without being asked to move on. These concerns suggest that many parts of our public environment have been designed primarily for movement and throughput.

These underground, air-conditioned corridors are a case in point. They perform exceptionally well at connecting people to where they want to go. But in Singapore’s heat and humidity, people wait, cool down, orient themselves, and sometimes linger longer than they otherwise would.

These corridors represent something underappreciated: genuinely accessible, climate-controlled civic space.

Urban design has long drawn a distinction between space and place. A space enables function, while a place carries meaning, social interaction and culture. People gather, spend time there and form emotional attachments.

Places don’t necessarily have to be grand or iconic, as research on place attachment shows. They just need to be welcoming of participation and shared experiences.

There is real potential to turn these underappreciated MRT walkways from spaces into places.

Retail shops might seem like an easy fix. But this could risk turning them into extensions of shopping environments in a city where retail options are already abundant. Rather than commercialisation, the goal should be to expand their behavioural range through enhanced design principles.

However, any new features would need to consider the fact that these walkways need to handle large volumes of movement, particularly during peak hours. They must be designed and located such that they do not disrupt flow or create congestion.

Some early steps have already been taken. There is the Art in Transit programme, where local artists are commissioned to create original artworks for MRT stations.

Public pianos and other musical instruments have been placed at selected stations to allow commuters to play or enjoy live music, as well as health kiosks for commuters to check their blood pressure.

These are all positive signals of intent. But they remain largely visual, or one-off interventions which do not substantially change how people use the space. Commuters still pass through rather than stop, interact or engage with one another.

What transformation could look like

We can go much further.

Rather than curated, static art, one possibility could be community memory installations. These could take the form of rotating digital panels or modular displays that feature short oral history clips, archival photographs or resident-contributed stories from the surrounding neighbourhood.

Updated periodically, they give regular commuters a reason to notice something new and connect the corridor to the place above ground.

Building on existing efforts like dementia go-to points in MRT stations, there could also be rotating information about local initiatives, social causes or support services, from volunteer opportunities to caregiving resources, making it easier for people to connect with the communities they pass through each day.

Over time, this turns a corridor from a neutral passage into a point of connection with the surrounding community.

Sensory design is another underused option. Research on salutogenic environments, that is, surroundings designed to support health rather than avoid harm, shows that even brief exposure to calming sensory conditions reduces stress and cognitive fatigue.

Lighting, acoustics and materials can be designed not just for visibility and durability, but to create a calmer environment. This could include warmer lighting in slower areas, sound-absorbing surfaces to reduce noise, or small pockets of greenery to soften the space.

In a commuting system used by millions, this is not a minor consideration.

Perhaps most promising are participatory elements – installations that invite simple, low-effort interaction that takes only a few seconds as people pass through. Commuters might tap a panel to register a mood, contribute a short message, or trigger a light or sound response as they walk by.

Over time, these small inputs could accumulate into a shared display, such as a changing light pattern or message wall reflecting the rhythms of the community.

Crucially, these suggestions do not require people to stop for long. But repeated across daily journeys, they foster familiarity among strangers and the social fabric that underpins a sense of place in dense cities.

They could even be playful. In a 2009 social experiment, Volkswagen turned a staircase in a Stockholm metro station into a functional piano, to encourage commuters to take the stairs.

Reframing a mundane choice between stairs and escalator through design and surprise can shift behaviour without any instruction. The principle transfers readily to transit corridors in our MRT stations.

Finally, rather than random scattered benches or seats, a more carefully designed approach to seating sends a deliberate signal that the space welcomes you to stop and engage with it. Carefully placed clusters of seating, located away from peak flow paths and integrated with greenery or art, can reinforce that invitation without impeding movement.

Taken together, all these are not additions. They represent a shift from designing corridors for movement to designing environments that can also hold people, however briefly.

Lessons from other cities

Other cities have already expanded the vocabulary.

Cities such as Copenhagen and Amsterdam increasingly design transit nodes as part of the surrounding urban fabric, integrating mobility with public life, greenery, and local identity.

In Tokyo, ekimae, or station-front spaces, are areas where shops, small public spaces and everyday activities are clustered together around a station’s entrance. Cultural and social life sits alongside movement, rather than being separate from it.

While Singapore does not have the same urban form, the underlying principle is relevant – transit spaces can double as neighbourhood touchpoints where people do more than pass through.

In Seoul, there have been experiments in integrating community services, small libraries and cultural programming into the subway network. Similar ideas could be adapted in Singapore, such as through compact reading corners or digital library kiosks located near station exits where people naturally slow down.

From these cities, we can see that a richer model of transit space already exists, one that can carry civic, cultural and social meaning without compromising efficiency.

From passage to place

Singapore’s MRT expansion is also an expansion of its public realm. Every new underground corridor is a new layer of the city, climate-controlled, accessible and free of the commercial logic that governs many indoor spaces here.

Singapore already has the institutional capacity to do better. We have strong planning agencies, integrated transport authorities and a growing body of work linking urban design to community well-being.

What is needed now is a shift in intent. Rather than treating these corridors as residual infrastructure that moves people efficiently, we can recognise them as a central part of the city’s social and climate system – environments designed to hold people briefly, meaningfully, and well.

The most ordinary part of a commute can be more than a passage. It can be a place.

• Samuel Chng is a research assistant professor at the Lee Kuan Yew Centre for Innovative Cities, Singapore University of Technology and Design, where he heads the Urban Psychology Lab.