SPEAKER
Dr Cheong Siew Ann
Associate Professor, Nanyang Technology University (NTU)
Principal Investigator, Future Cities Laboratory (FCL) Global
Dr Cheong Siew Ann was born in Singapore in 1969. After getting through his primary, secondary, and junior college education in Ama Keng Primary School, the Chinese High School, and Hwa Chong Junior College respectively, and thereafter a contract service with the Singapore Armed Forces, he studied physics at the National University of Singapore. He graduated in 1997 with a BSc (Hons) degree in physics and went on to obtain his PhD in theoretical condensed matter physics from Cornell University in 2006. He then spent a year and a half as a postdoctoral associate with the Cornell Theory Centre, working on biological sequence segmentation, before joining NTU as an Assistant Professor in Physics and Applied Physics in August 2007. He was promoted to Associate Professor in 2016. His main research interest is in developing data analysis methods and toy models for understanding the dynamics of complex systems such as biological macromolecules, the brain, earthquakes, financial markets, infectious diseases, and human society.
Topic: Cities as Social Reactors
Cities play a role similar to the cell membrane in cells, in that they intensify the interactions of constituents within small spaces. This intensification gives rise to myriad processes that make biological life possible in a cell. We believe the same is true for urban and cultural life in a city. In fact, in cities the outcomes of these interactions are highly desirable, in that they lead to diversification and innovation. However, we also believe that rewarding intensification of these social interactions cannot be achieved by simply making a city larger in geographical size, or in Singapore’s case, make uniformly increasing the population density. We argue that intensification is best done by creatively scheduling the self-organised hierarchy of social interactions over their enabling spaces, so that we achieve the desired interactions as the result of intensifying over time, without making too much demand of space.