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1967
ENVIRONMENT AND NATION BUILDING
I want to
talk about love of the land as the vital ingredient of nationalism and
nation building and what it means in terms of our actual policies and
efforts in shaping our living environment - our land - to foster this
love for the land. It is typical of a transient society such as ours that
values other than those which pertain to practical and imme-diate needs
are often discarded, put aside or held to be of no consequence.
I submit that it is just as vitally important to have a beautiful, delightful
and more humane Singapore city - a city in which every human value is
catered for - as it is important to achieve economic take-off.
The fact that we have been so successful in solving the housing shortage
is in itself an admirable achievement. By 1975, a total of 35% of Singapore's
people will be accommodated in public housing. In social terms, public
housing therefore has a tremendous new challenge to provide the type of
housing conducive towards building up of healthy communities, generating
the new spirit of community consciousness. Sufficient public housing has
now been built, enabling a comprehensive sociological assessment to be
made in order to guide us in the way ahead.
Are the densities developed too high? Is it possible to create living
communities at densities over 200 persons per acre(sic) without going
into highly sophisticated building and environmental design? Can communities
be sustained within a slab-block environment? Do existing tenancy conditions
and regulations create a sense of permanence? These are some of the pressing
questions which we must look into in order to ensure that public housing
in future will reflect the drive for a new national community.
One of the biggest problems in mass housing is in creating identity in
each housing group so that people will feel that they belong there, and
that there is something unique about their area, district and neighbourhood
which they can be proud of. The problem of identity is illustrated when
a foreign visitor was brought around on a tour of Singapore and after
visiting several public housing estates, remarked: "Haven't I been
here before?"
The policy of encouraging a property-owning democracy by selling of public
housing units is essentially a correct one, but perhaps this can best
be achieved by encouraging the existing housing co-operative societies
to be more active. The housing co-operative movement has the advantage
in that it is essentially more intimate and more personalised.
This being
so, it can achieve a more sophisticated approach towards human habitat
catering for more specific human needs.
Central Provident Fund contributions could also be used as security for
a house loan. By allowing people to participate in the building of their
own homes, they will be house-proud and environmentally-conscious.
We should not build at so low a density that we have to sprawl all over
the island. Neither should we be so panic-stricken and build at excessively
high den-sities thereby forcing us to jump up the scale of sophistication
in order to create communities in high-rise housing.
We should build compact high density; medium-rise housing in which it
is possible to create viable communities. This is the criterion upon which
tobase our land use and density policies.
Civic urban values do not come naturally to those who descended from the
pioneers who came here to make a living or to seek a fortune. Their values
were hard work, business acumen and a sense of daring. Understandably,
there was little concern for beauty, civic order and social amenity.
We have, most of us, never experienced the environment of a great civic
city. Pedestrian precincts, city squares, the mall, the boulevard, in
short all those features that make it good to be in a city. But for Raffles,
Singapore could have developed into a totally mercenary place for making
money without any environmental considerations. The proximity to the sea,
the coastal promenades, the hills reserved for public and institutional
use, and a reasonably ordered urban street pattern - these we owe to Raffles'
foresight. We are now about to launch into Singapore's brave new future
and we should therefore have the same boldness in our environmental planning
ideas, recognising the uniqueness of Singapore's affinity to the sea and
exploiting it positively as a unifying feature of Singapore.
When Singapore citizens can be as proud of Singapore as a Parisian is
of Paris, a Greek of Athens, a Venetian of Venice, we would have entrenched
Singapore as an abstract ideal in the hearts and minds of every Singapore
citizen and we would have achieved true nationhood.
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