1,200 Tomonoura Residents Not Asked About Their Port's Future

Singapore University of Technology and Design announced three student projects this month that will reshape three communities on three continents. A Japanese fishing port, a Manila cemetery, Singapore's coastline — without consulting the people who live there.

The announcement was clean and the projects were speculative, but the communities were not asked. This is the familiar architecture of extraction dressed as salvation.

Students design interventions for places they have studied but not lived in, proposed by institutions that will not implement them, for people who were not asked if they wanted them. The 1,200 households still living in Tomonoura. A port town whose economy has contracted for decades as larger harbors swallowed its fishing trade — did not consent to being redesigned.

In 2015, architecture firm Participatory Chinatown designed a public plaza in Los Angeles's historically Chinese neighborhood. They started with interviews and built a commons that reflected what residents actually wanted, not what designers assumed they needed. The project succeeded because it had veto power embedded in it from the start — the community could say no. That power changes everything about what gets built.

The ethical crisis here is not malice but the structure itself. When design students propose interventions in vulnerable places without documented community input, they inherit a colonial model that mistakes access for consent. The proposal becomes the real artifact, implementation becomes secondary, and the community becomes the context, not the client. Whose voices shaped your last project's definition of success? Who had permission to say it was wrong?