Srilalitha Gopalakrishnan is a landscape architect with over 15 years of professional experience and a diverse portfolio of projects across Singapore, Malaysia, China, Hong Kong and India. She has worked with Tierra Design in Singapore for over 11 years on projects ranging from residential, commercial, hospitality, institutional, recreational and master planning with many of her projects winning several accolades. Her strong belief in integrated landscape design as an effective solution for sustainable high-density urban environments motivated the move towards pursuing a PhD in Architecture and Sustainable Design at Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD). Under the guidance and supervision of Professor Thomas Schroepfer at SUTD, her research interest focuses on the increased benefits of integrated landscape design in high-density urban environments and the development of strategies towards evidence-based design practice for economically and socially sustainable urban design solutions. Dedicated to raising the quality and standards of her field within Singapore and Asia, she serves on the Council of the Singapore Institute of Landscape Architects (SILA) as 1st Vice President and lectures at local educational institutions.

High-density liveable future ‘vertical’ cities require new integrated planning and design strategies that acknowledge their scale and the complexity of their systems and networks. The complex interactions of extensions of public open spaces into the vertical dimension with those on the ground level, their impact on patterns of human movement in the city, their contribution to a more liveable high-density urban environment, and their scalability are currently not well understood. The research examines exemplary built case studies and to better understand how integrated landscape spaces in buildings influence residents’ behaviour and movement patterns within and around the site and how they encourage social interactions, user activities and enhanced physical and mental well-being. The collected data in the case studies will be analysed to provide important insights regarding pedestrian movements in the horizontal and vertical planes, and their social and spatial interactions with larger urban systems and networks of public and common in ground and elevated spaces. The research will subsequently develop spatial distribution and design strategies for such spaces that will help to support higher population densities, higher standards of environmental and social sustainability as well as enhanced liveability in future high-density urban environments.