just had my geog/urban planning class and we were talking abt housing sub-markets. and of cos, one of the submarkets is public housing. and the focus was on public housing in the US but there was a portion abt those in soviet union and singapore and a girl, from m'sia formerly but american now, mentioned that despite the public housing looking aesthetically more appealing on the OUTSIDE in s'pore as compared to US, it is quite ugly inside.

that caught me by surprise. growing up in singapore, being so used to the way void decks are... well, it never struck me as 'ugly'. it was... normal. i can see where she comes from though, if you compare it to the floor landings of private apartments so common here. But i guess, this being the last lecture and all, it really made me appreciate taking this class juz cos they are so much more critical of singapore's system, and it opened my view about housing and governance and the city as a whole.

i mean, at the end of the day, i think i'm still more suited for singapore-styled government, and it suits the small size and the city-state-nation powers that the government has (as compared to like the diff roles that the federal, state and city government plays here) and i firmly believe that with the change in demographics and the change of values and beliefs that people have about their community, politics in singapore will take on a distinctly new shape in the future. (but, first pple's attitudes have to change and social change always takes a loooong time. political change, not like a new party or system, but in an increasingly flexibility and citizen participation/ownership/responsibility form will only come in response to social change)

the US is very anti-public housing, and pro homeownership. this is, of cos, in part due to the failure of the public housing in the 1950s and such. but you have things like coops and community housing here, stuff that i don't really see happening in singapore. but. i wonder how long is it before s'poreans start feeling that they don't need a modernist, technocratic planner who thinks he knows all, to tell them where to live (no.. this isn't my job. land zoning does not equal to the HDB pple yea?) i guess HDB sees that in the future too, and that explains the increasing change in function and the focus on aesthetics and higher SES oriented flats.

on one hand, you will want to allow pple their freedom in the kind of choices they make abt their own personal space. on the other hand, in a land scarce city like ours, where every decision on a local level is also a decision on a national level simply due to the nature of our country, how much of this decision do you want to leave in the hands of citizens? how much does the government trust the citizens that they educated and provided for?

okay a little case of verbal diarrhoea today i guess haha. but it's juz something that has been sitting at the back of my head all this while and i never really got a chance to put it into words. guess seeing how pple here value democracy and freedom to such a great extent challenges how i've always viewed our government, and our definition of democracy and freedom.

but, like they always say, there's nothing like home.