overheard on a doco which made me think how life has changed rather quickly.
from kampungs and open fields
to void decks. what a name! void decks.
becoming such a closed society where we live.
front yards with high fences
spending our lazy afternoons in the backyard where no one can see
is it such a faraway place to sit out front and watch the world go by, whilst saying hi? has it become so hard to be friendly without an agenda? we'll see.
Singapore's making moves to destroy our last remaining village at Jalan Buangkok. Seriously, do we need more (read another) modern high rise steel citied skyscapes? And must we really do WITHOUT our last village/kampung? Perhaps I don't have the lateral foresight of our urban planners. But that's their job as administrators. As a citizen, I am saddened. Must the only way to experience our life of old be through printed material and glossy brochures that really does little to save our trees?
"SINGAPORE — It is Singapore’s secret Eden, a miniature village called Kampong Buangkok that is hidden in trees among the massed apartment blocks, where a fresh breeze rustles the coconut palms and tropical birds whoop and whistle.
Charles Pertwee for The International Herald Tribune
The New York Times
Kampong Buangkok will be demolished and redeveloped.
With just 28 houses in an area the size of three football fields, it is Singapore’s last rural hamlet, a forgotten straggler in the rush to modernize this high-rise, high-tech city-state. But apparently not for much longer. Kampong Buangkok is designated by the government for demolition and redevelopment, possibly in the near future. When it is gone, one of the world’s most extreme national makeovers will be complete.
Kampong is a local word for village and also defines a traditional rural way of life that Singapore has left behind.
“The big overhaul began in the early 1960s,” said Rodolph de Koninck, a professor of geography at the University of Montreal and one of the authors of “Singapore: An Atlas of Perpetual Territorial Transformation,” which graphically charts a half-century of change.
As the decades passed, a clamorous tropical settlement reinvented itself as a spic-and-span outpost of the developed world."
For full article, go here.
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otherwise...
good thing I'm back now that it's summer in full swing in Melbourne. It as 39 when I left, and Singapore's been rather kindly cooling!
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