End Of 2018 Special: Mixed Use Projects

The walls of living and work spaces are coming down as mixeduse development rises throughout Southeast Asia. With clients looking for convenience and developers keen to diversify their assets, the trend is only predicted to grow.

- Oliver Irvine

From Singapore to Ho Chi Minh City, Southeast Asian developers are seeing the benefits of mingling business with pleasure. Self-contained communities that offer residences, retail, offices, and green spaces are emerging as the new development paradigm across a region where old ideas of city zoning are being eroded by vertical mixed-use mega-projects.

Singapore’s newly opened Marina One residential and office development has added a tropical, green heart to the CBD in the form of a 65,000-square-foot garden designed in collaboration between Ingenhoven Architects and landscape specialists ICN Design.

Jakarta’s District 8, a development of 11 towers across 4.8 hectares of the Sudirman Central Business District, has also reached completion. Developed by the Agung Sedayu Group, it brings residences and a public park right into the heart of South Jakarta’s financial zone.

In Bangkok, TCC Group’s One Bangkok (in partnership with Golden Land and Frasers Property Limited) is a USD3.5 billion development that covers an area one third the size of the adjacent Lumphini Park and encompasses living and work space for 60,000 people, including residential buildings, office towers, retail zones, and publicly accessible parks and green spaces.

“Vertical communities often deal with the high density mandated for many Asian city centres,” says Ping Jiang, the design principal at EID architecture. His firm designed the 320-metretall OCT XI’AN International Centre (OXIC) in Xi’an, China, where parks, piazza-style common areas, and even terrace streets are positioned over multiple storeys of two skyscrapers.