Want a liveable city? Make it child-friendly first

Refer to the article below about how living in Singapore can be improved.

Singapore not as perfect as it seems, according to urban planning expert

By Tan Hui Yee

SINGAPORE is often cited as one of the world's more liveable cities, but a stroll through Kampong Glam, Little India, Tanjong Pagar and other downtown areas led one visiting expert to a more muted conclusion.

Yes, there is much the Republic is doing right, much the rest of the world can envy, but the country is falling down in one key area - it is not thinking small enough.

Child-sized, to be precise, because cities must first be liveable for kids before they can be liveable for all, according to urban planning consultant Suzanne Crowhurst Lennard, who was in town recently for the World Cities Summit.

And while Singapore is clearly streets ahead in terms of its crime rate, the walks around town she undertook over four days showed up other problems.

She found that traffic in downtown Singapore is a tad too heavy and street- level crossings inadequate for children to wander around on their own.

In her view, a city needs to facilitate such independent access for children if it wants to be truly liveable.

Child-friendly cities thrive because everyone needs fundamentally the same things, like an accessible environment and rich social life. By focusing on meeting the needs of children - one of the most vulnerable and physically weakest groups in the community - the city can get its basics right.

But that does not mean ever more kiddie rides, cartoon murals or playgrounds.

'The ideal play area for children is the city itself,' says Dr Crowhurst Lennard, 65, the founder of the International Making Cities Liveable Council, which is based in Portland, Oregon.

Generally, it is a bad idea to relegate children to just children's facilities because they learn best when able to freely mingle with and observe adults in an everyday setting. And catering to children is not that hard.

'On a simple level, it is a matter of walkability. Children have to be able to get around safely on their own as early as possible and explore their environment.

'That means it has to be safe not only from traffic, but also a good socially safe environment where there are familiar adults along the way who recognise them and speak to them - people of different ages,' she said.

So, buildings, roads, parks and street furniture should be designed to inspire imagination, invite exploration and serve multiple uses.

For example, steps should be comfortable enough to invite seating, walls should be low enough to be 'climbed on, sat on, or walked along', and window ledges and planter ledges should be broad enough to double as seats. Meanwhile, public art should welcome children instead of being plastered with 'no climbing' or 'no touching' signs.

'All kinds of public art should be meaningful and understandable to children. They should tell children about the history and traditions of the city. And they should be able to be played on.'

She cites, as a good example, the bronze sculptures of The River Merchants by local artist Aw Tee Hong, which details the lives of traders by the Singapore River when the island was under colonial rule. Passers-by continually stop to touch the sculptures and clamber on to pose for photographs.

And our bright shiny malls, centre of much of Singapore life? They get a firm thumbs down.

Malls are increasingly becoming meeting spots and teenage hang-outs as they are being planned around transport nodes, but Dr Crowhurst Lennard says they are 'not ideal' as a public space given the restrictions on what can occur there.

Instead, an open, flexible public space does better at engaging young minds.

'It can be used as a market in the morning, for festivals in afternoon and on a quiet (evening), just for sitting out and relating to people...It can be used for a school performance or some kind of local community festival.'

She thinks child-friendly environments make everybody's lives - especially older folk - easier. This is because they have 'very similar needs to children' - like being within walking distance to cafes, shops and libraries or other social nodes where they can interact with people as their social circle shrinks with age.

Yet, the quality of social life is all too often overlooked by city planners too engrossed with the hardware of their cities. 'Liveability' is regularly confused with 'standard of living', she says.

The latter refers to better health care, educational standards and a more comfortable environment that comes with higher incomes.

Meanwhile, liveability 'has more to do with quality of everyday social life, the interactions that we have every day and the quality of those interactions'.

In her view, a poor neighbourhood with abysmal sanitation could have a socially richer quality of life than a wealthier one with its plumbing systems in order.

'The trick is to try to figure out how to reclaim that rich social life and still keep our high standards of living,' she says.

Some cities get it right, although the one she cited might surprise - the seething tourist hot spot of Venice. Yet she notes that the 'museum city' actually hosts rich social networks supported by gracious infrastructure.

'While some people are richer, some poorer, they live side by side, everyone takes the same public transit and walks the same streets,' she says.

These social networks are based on Venetians' own home campo - the square they grew up in or live in - rather than their job or status.

The networks are strengthened by their shared memories of the city as well as the stories that collect around its landmarks.

'A community exists only when people know each others' stories. I would have to know all about you, where you grew up, what your childhood was like, who your parents were and who you played with in order for me to feel that I were part of your community or you were part of my community'.

Parents expand this community when they share memories of the city with their children. But the task becomes 'much harder' when the cityscape changes very fast - as it does in Singapore. The loss of a social landmark, like a long-reigning coffee shop, would then feel like a 'death in the family'.

She feels cities must have continuity in some measure: '(You need) social life that children take part in as they get to know their city.'

Ideally, a city should also have mixed-use environments, old and young from all walks of life working and playing in the same district. Such an integrated concept is regaining currency as urban planners realise the fallacy of zoning regulations that create buzzing business districts by day and dead zones by night.

In the United States, where middle-class families spent decades fleeing the cities for the suburbs, people are 'realising they have to bring the population back to the downtown area, and people are beginning to move back'.

'(People) want to be within walking distance of cafes and restaurants and nightlife and the resources of the city,' she says. 'This will be a trend for the future.'

The growing complaint in Singapore that only the well-off can afford to live within or close to the city as homes are so expensive gets a sympathetic response.

'That is not a good solution,' she declares, as it creates a rather skewed environment.

She thinks housing quotas for different income groups could help right the balance in the same way the Housing Board sets quotas for ethnic groups in each block and precinct.

In such an inclusive environment - where young and old, rich and poor, different ethnicities live together - people learn to 'negotiate with each other...and appreciate each others' values'. And it is these environments that will best meet the social needs of children - and ultimately, society.

'We need to live in as equitable an urban environment as possible,' she says. 'We need to live in a district where we all experience the diversity of our society as much as possible.'

Foreign Talent - Should we stay or should they go?

These 2 articles relay some differences in their viewpoints.

1) Foreign Talent by Melissa Sim http://business.asiaone.com/Business/News/Office/Story/A1Story20100503-213783.html
2) Little choice by falling birth rate by Vince Chong

1. What do you think are the roles of non-citizens in Singapore?
2. To what extent do you see non-citizens contributing to our society and on what levels? (eg. social, economical and political )
3. What are our roles as citizens when communicating and working with non-citizens in Singapore?
4. What are some of the advantages and disadvantages of policies aimed at helping non-citizens integrate into our society?

Twitter means so many things...

Twitter has definitely changed the world in leaps and bounds but this article from Guardian dispels many myths. One is that the popularity of Twitter is not propelled by teens. This insight by a 15 year-old seems to be ground-breaking to Morgan Stanley. Why so?

Rockstar: Only "Terrible Parents" Buy Our Games for Their Kids

Radio personality and Rockstar producer Lazlow Jones has a message for people who buy Rockstar games for their kids: "You're a terrible parent."

Rockstar games are awesome. They're also most definitely not for kids. From Grand Theft Auto to Manhunt to the new Red Dead Redemption, just about everyone agrees that these are games that parents should keep far away from their children. And for those parents who do let their kids play them, because they don't know any better or they just don't care, Rockstar has a message: You suck.

"Our games are not designed for young people," said Lazlow Jones, who hooked up with Rockstar in 2001 by writing and performing in radio segments in Grand Theft Auto 3. "If you're a parent and buy one of our games for your child, you're a terrible parent."

"We design games for adults because we're adults," he continued. "There's a lot of kids' games out there that we're not interested in playing. Just like you enjoy watching movies and TV shows with adult themes and language and violence, that's the kind of thing we seek to produce."

He claimed that despite its reputation, Rockstar gets relatively little "pushback" from rating boards, although he noted that the videogame industry in general faces far greater challenges than other media when it comes to producing mature content. "If you tell a gritty crime drama with violence and profanity and call it The Sopranos you're handed a load of awards to put up on the shelf," he said. "You do the same and call it a videogame and you'll have certain organizations up in arms."

But times are changing and Lazlow thinks Rockstar deserves a lot of credit for "pushing the boundaries" of what's acceptable in videogames today. "I think ever since GTA IV came out and there were such rave reviews by major publications saying that this is actually art the restrictions about being politically correct have largely fallen away," he said.

Source: TheEscapist

S'pore: Lowest child mortality

PARIS - SINGAPORE is ranked first in the world for the lowest estimated rates of children under five who die each year for 2010, followed by Iceland, Sweden, Cyprus and Luxembourg.

In the United States - whose ranking has dropped from 20th to 42 since 1970 - the mortality rate is nearly double the European average. But the proportion of under-five children who die each year across the globe has dropped 60 per cent over the past four decades, according to a study published Monday.

In the last 20 years this salutary decline has accelerated, with the number of deaths among newborns, infants and one-to-four year olds falling from 11.9 million to an estimated 7.7 million in 2010, the new figures show.

That remains a staggeringly large number of young lives lost, many to preventable diseases and overwhelmingly in the world's poorest nations. A child born today in Chad, Mali or Nigeria is nearly sixty times less likely to see her or his fifth birthday than one born in Scandinavia. And progress still falls short of the trajectory needed to meet the UN's Millennium Development goal of slashing child deaths globally by 66 per cent between 1990 and 2015.

But the decline in under-five mortality is still an encouraging achievement, and suggests further progress is possible, the report says. Even at the current rate of improvement, there are 31 countries on pace to meet the UN benchmark for 2015, including Brazil, Mexico, Malaysia and Egypt.

All told, 54 of the 187 nations examined in the study are poised to reach the goal. In 1970 there were more than 200 under-five deaths for every 1,000 live births, the measure used to rank nations in this grim index. By 1990, that list had dwindled to 12, and today no country crosses the 200-death threshold, according to the study, published in the British medical journal The Lancet.

'One of the biggest achievements of the past 20 years has been this incredible progress in countries that historically have had the highest child mortality in the world,' said Christopher Murray, Director of the University of Washington's Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) and co-author of the study. --AFP

Source: ST (24 May 2010)

Game Addicts Arrested for Starving Baby to Death

3-month-old Starves to Death While Parents Spend Hours in Internet Cafes

Gaming addiction turned horrifically tragic as the three-month-old daughter of a Korean couple starved to death while her parents were caring for a virtual daughter during a 12-hour MMOG session.

The couple, identified only as "the Kims" due to Korean privacy laws, had met in 2008 over an online dating site and subsequently married and had a child. The husband, 41, and the wife, 25 were both unemployed, living with the parents of the wife. Both spent most of their time at 24-hour internet cafes, notorious for crowds of gamers and dense cigarette smoke, even during the pregnancy. The couple called the police in September to report their daughter's death after returning from a 12-hour gaming session.

The autopsy results were chilling. The child, who had been born prematurely, died of malnutrition. The couple also admitted to feeding her rotten powdered milk as well as spanking her whenever she cried. The child was generally neglected in favor of an online daughter over the Korean MMOG PRIUS, which was consuming much of the couple's play time at internet cafes while their daughter was left alone and unfed.

South Korea has had serious problems with gaming addiction, which has led to a number of deaths via exhaustion in the past few years. "There's no certain clinical indicator to define 'game addiction' but our study shows that brain PET [scan] images of suspected online game addicts are very similar to that of a cocaine addict," Dr. Kim Sang Eun of Seoul National University Bundang Hospital said. The problem is reportedly even higher in Korea due to the nation's 95 percent broadband access, and the fact that there are more mobile phones in South Korea than there are people.

While obviously an extreme example, it is nevertheless one that cannot be ignored. Fortunately, most gamers aren't this irresponsible, but it's still a very real risk in our world.

Source: ABC News (4 Mar 20101)

Is Singapore the worst environmental offender?

ST - A NATIONAL University of Singapore (NUS) study which ranked Singapore as the worst environmental offender among 179 countries has drawn a sharp response from the Government, but its authors are standing by it.

The study, jointly done by NUS and the University of Adelaide, found that Singapore's headlong rush into developing a modern megalopolis over the last 30 years had taken a terrible toll on its natural environment.

The Ministry of the Environment and Water Resources, however, has slammed the 16-page paper - which looks at relative environmental impact of countries - for not taking into account the 'unique circumstances of each country'.

Responding to queries from The Straits Times, a ministry spokesman said that the study was based on a proportional environmental impact index, which is defined only in terms of total land area.

'As such, countries with limited land size which have high intensity of land use would be necessarily disadvantaged in this proportional index,' said the spokesman.

'Correspondingly, the main indices which contributed to Singapore's poor ranking were contingent on total land area. For example, natural habitat conversion, which is the area of human-modified land divided by total land area, unfairly penalises Singapore's high urban density.'

In response, Professor Corey Bradshaw, 38, director of ecological modelling at the University of Adelaide's Environment Institute and one of the paper's three authors, was adamant that the data spoke for itself.

'We didn't make it up,' he said. 'It's publicly available data so anyone can look at this.'

The study, which took about three years to complete, was published by peer-reviewed online science journal PLoS ONE.

Professor Navjot Sodhi, 48, from the NUS department of biological sciences and co-author of the paper, said Singapore's rapid development in the last 30 years has seen it lose 90 per cent of its forest, 67 per cent of its birds, about 40 per cent of its mammals and 5 per cent of its amphibians and reptiles.

The study is thought to be the first in the world to adopt a new rating system which looks only at environmental indicators such as forest loss, natural habitat conversion, marine captures, carbon emissions and biodiversity.

As the index focuses on modern environmental impact, it 'ignores some elements of historical degradation such as deforestation in Europe', the authors said in the paper. It therefore 'might penalise developing nations more heavily'.

Although a country like Brazil, for example, has chopped down more rain-forests, Singapore, proportional to its size, has wreaked greater destruction as nearly all its forests have made way for urbanisation, explained Prof Bradshaw.

He added: 'Singapore's development over the last 20 to 30 years has meant that it has done the worst damage to its environment.'

Developing and developed nations such as South Korea, Qatar, Kuwait, Japan, Thailand, Malaysia, the Philippines and the Netherlands were also penalised by the proportional index.

While Singapore fared poorly in terms of proportional environmental impact, it is too small to figure in terms of global or absolute environmental impact. For that, the 10 worst countries are: Brazil, the United States, China, Indonesia, Japan, Mexico, India, Russia, Australia and Peru.

The authors conceded that Singapore was something of an anomaly as it is a city state, and a fairer comparison would be between it and other cities such as New York City and Hong Kong.

The negative rating is not the first Singapore has received in environmental studies.

The Republic has frequently been cited as having one of the highest per capita carbon emissions globally by the Energy Information Administration (EIA), which provides energy statistics to the US government, factoring in data such as carbon emissions from bunker fuel, aviation and refining processes.

Latest EIA data taken in 2006 indicated that Singapore emitted 141 million tonnes of carbon emissions, ranking it as the 33rd-highest emitter of greenhouse gases among 215 countries.

Singapore - which adopts a measurement standard that does not include bunker fuel, aviation and refining emissions, which is in line with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change guidelines - puts its own carbon emissions figure as 40 million tonnes.

In this year's Environmental Performance Index (EPI), which ranks 163 countries on both environmental public health and ecosystem vitality, Singapore did better, coming in 28th with 69.6 points. Iceland fared the best with a score of 93.5 and Sierra Leone came in last with 32.1.

Speaking to leaders at the Copenhagen climate change conference in December last year, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong defended Singapore's environmental record, saying it had taken environmental issues seriously since its independence more than 44 years ago.

He said Singapore had recently set a voluntary and domestically funded target to reduce emission growth by 16 per cent from business-as-usual levels by 2020, subject to a globally binding climate change deal.

He described this as 'a substantial commitment which will entail significant economic and social costs'.

Source: Straits Times