How a Civic Tech Founder and a Heritage Artist Are Reshaping Singapore's Festival Calendar

When Priya Lakshmanan first pitched her idea to the Urban Redevelopment Authority in late 2024, she had no festival experience—only a spreadsheet and a conviction that Singapore's event calendar wasn't working for everyone. The civic tech entrepreneur, who built an app tracking neighbourhood accessibility, noticed something troubling: major festivals clustered in the same zones, leaving entire communities like Bukit Merah and Geylang Serai neglected in the planning cycle.

"I kept hearing people say they'd love to celebrate at home, in their neighbourhoods," recalls Lakshmanan. Her solution was simple but radical—partner with established festivals to create satellite events across all five planning areas. This June, that vision manifested in the most distributed festival season Singapore has seen, with River Hongbao extending beyond Marina Bay to include activations at Kallang Basin and Punggol Waterway Park.

The unlikely co-architect of this shift is Mohideen Abdul Rashid, a 58-year-old Peranakan heritage artist who spent three decades running a museum-gallery tucked in a Joo Chiat Road shophouse. When Lakshmanan approached him about leading the expanded Peranakan Festival's community design phase, Rashid saw an opportunity to decentralise cultural storytelling that had traditionally flowed from institutions toward residents.

"Heritage shouldn't be performed for tourists," says Rashid's belief, evident in how he restructured the 2026 festival. Instead of concentrated events, his team trained 47 community ambassadors across Kampong Glam, Katong, and Tiong Bahru to host intimate heritage walks and cooking demonstrations in residents' homes and local shops. Budget? Just $340,000—a fifth of what centralised programming typically costs.

The partnership hasn't been frictionless. Regulatory approval for neighbourhood-scale events required navigating 14 different government touchpoints. Insurance costs ballooned when expanding beyond single venues. But by March, they'd secured permits for 63 distributed events across 12 neighbourhoods.

Early numbers suggest the gamble is paying off. Peranakan Festival attendance jumped 34% year-on-year, while satisfaction scores in outer districts—historically the lowest—climbed to 7.8/10 from 5.2. River Hongbao's satellite programs attracted 180,000 visitors who'd never attended before, according to preliminary URA data.

What began as one woman's accessibility audit and one artist's conviction has quietly reshaped Singapore's cultural calendar. As planning agencies now consider district-first approaches for next year's events, Lakshmanan and Rashid's experiment proves something the city-state needed reminding: the best festivals aren't built by committees in air-conditioned offices, but by people who actually live in the neighbourhoods they celebrate.

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