PlayPan Singapore: A Social Experiment that Brought “Play for Good” to Fruition

From July 2023 until January 2024, Singapore social movement PlayPan, co-founded by car dealer owner Gary Hong and philanthropic organisation head Yvonne Siow, conducted a community takeover of Peace Centre, an old shopping mall that had been earmarked for demolition and subsequent redevelopment. The duo hoped to give back to society by offering a space for people to do good and conduct creative collaboration through the takeover, which was framed as a social experiment. Tenants ran the gamut, ranging from artists and social enterprises to escape rooms, a horror house, and a barbershop.

During those six months, PlayPan adopted an unconventional way of selecting and managing tenants. Instead of evaluating prospective tenants on the basis of how they might generate profits, Hong and Siow made quick decisions based on an intuitive assessment of the prospective tenants’ “energy” and “aura” in order to establish their trustworthiness and values.

PlayPan also adopted a hybrid management approach – it used a top-down approach when necessary, such as during the rave held on the last night of operations when the crowd threatened to go out of control, but otherwise gave tenants a lot of leeway to follow their own initiative.

But given the limited duration of the takeover, could PlayPan sustain the same kind of energy for longer periods and at new locations? And was there a better way to manage the place when so much freedom was being granted?

The case is designed for an undergraduate sociology or public policy course, and possibly management and innovation-related courses. Participants should achieve the following learning objectives: analyse how an organisation is innovative, examine how bureaucratic and collectivist practices were used to manage a mall and its activities, assess how an organisation could be considered self-managing, and evaluate how a mall as a public-cum-arts space can contribute to community development.

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