A Singaporean Kind of Metropolis

Last night, I was playing a frustrating game of SimCity 4. SimCity is a game that allows you to design your own city, complete with natural disasters, odd land forms, and basically you're the mayor (and occasionally God, since you can send natural disasters your civilians' way) of the city. You need to get the money moving, businesses growing, people happy blah blah, while your city planning committee is shaking their heads at your rising expenditure. Blah again.

Politics sure is hard.

Call it coincidental that I was playing this game around midnight of August 9 - Singapore's 48th National Day. It then dawned on me that Singapore has come a long, long way. Yes this sounds exceedingly cliche, and a part of me is secretly scoffing at myself for having a lack of vocabulary. Haha. But honestly, we have come this far.

Thinking about how I struggle with my game's city-planning made me think about the people who made Singapore become this beautiful city to live in. In the game, I can never understand why no business deals come my way, and as much as I try, I can't even attract businesses to move into some of my low-density or medium-density commercial areas! (Ironically the high-density skyscrapers do come along just fine...)

Planning roads and streets, avenues and freeways, and elevated rail/monorail tracks, and the subway and the toll system - you thought it was just about placing them here and there, and demolishing it when you make a mistake. Well yes, and no. You can't just demolish stuff just because you made a mistake - IT'S GONNA COST YOU MONEY.

Too many roads? = Too many maintenance costs = Committee starts complaining.
Too many streets, too few roads? = Your people are going to complain of massive traffic jams and your whole game is gonna be filled with the sounds of car crashes. Ouch.  = Committee starts complaining.

I have a new found respect for our road, expressway, residential, commercial planners - urban planners for short. Who decides which is the best layout for commercial, trade, housing purposes and weighs all gains and opportunity costs?

It took many bright minds, a great deal of patience and hardcore planning skills to make our Singapore today WORK.

So I came up with a list:

Here's 5 awesome things about Singapore we can really rave about/appreciate:
1. We have no natural disasters! Our closest natural disaster would probably be our lightning and thunderstorms. No massive mass destruction means less expenditure, and means more money for other developments! (Compare the expense of cleaning up a lightning-struck fallen tree off the road, and city-wide typhoon destruction. I'll take fallen trees any day.)

2. We have a low crime rate! We can go home late at night, never having to worry about being mugged or kidnapped. This technically means we have more hours in one day than someone else in another Western country where days generally end about 6pm every evening and people simply go home, have dinner and sleep.

So... we have more time for leisure.

It's too bad we spend most of our leisure time playing phone games like Candy Crush, Clash of Clans, Kingdom Rush, Hay Day, and then complain...

"We have no time to relax!"

"I have no time for myself!"

"Too many things to do, too little time."

"Singapore is so stressful! Don't have time for anything else other than work and school!"

Right...

3. "24-hours"and "Opening until late" is a common thing in Singapore. Continued from point 2, our shopping malls, our suburban malls, our little neighbourhood NTUC  (FairPrice) just 5-15 minutes' walk away closes at 9ish every day. If you're lucky, you may even be living walking-distance from a 24-hours Prata Shop, or NTUC FairPrice.

Hungry at 9pm? Get out for some mee goreng from the prata shop.
Urge to take a dump and ran out of heavy-duty toilet paper at 11pm? Sprint out and get it from your 24-hours NTUC FairPrice.

Photo Credit: NTUC FairPrice Facebook Page
Caption added by myself. Haha.

Look at those faces. All ready to serve you. Kudos to workers who don't mind covering the night shift, and working through the night. Definitely grateful to these people because they make 24-hour service possible. Also, I'm especially thankful for this because my dad and I do our groceries around 10pm to 12 midnight!

4. We are really clean! Our leaders definitely did the right thing in emphasising public cleanliness and public safety.

Here's the recently widely-advertised "Keep Singapore Clean" campaign.


Despite the dramatisation... This is surely not a Singapore you and I want to see.

I feel grateful to all the daily garbage-collectors, the men in the mobile vacuum (whatever that is, he goes around the estate and sucks up all the ground leaves haha), the hawker centre cleaners, and toilet cleaners everywhere. Everyone plays a part in making a society a society and truly without these people, Singapore wouldn't be what Singapore is at present.

You may say "Hey, cleaners are paid. It's their job." But think about it, if the government did not enforce this social requirement to have cleaning services in every building/hawker centre/business, would Singapore be as clean as it is today?

5. We are a multicultural society. 

Every day we are exposed to different kinds of people from all walks of life and family backgrounds. We say we are made up of Chinese, Indian, Malay, Eurasian races, but hey, not all Chinese are the same kind of Chinese! We may come from different dialects, different "home countries", different backgrounds. Similarly, not all Malays are the same, and not all Indians originate from the same areas in India - which makes all of us pretty different if you ask me.

Being brought up with all of these has definitely given us greater sensitivities in general. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I've heard that non-Singaporeans actually say that Singaporeans can understand and communicate in English with foreigners really well. This is supposedly due to the fact that we are exposed to many more different ways of speaking English (e.g. British English, American English through movies and drama series, Chinglish and Singlish on a normal day), and hence are able to understand much more easily both Western and Eastern accents when communicating in English.

If that is true, hey! We common folk are good at something!

***

Some days I wake up, trudge to take a bus to the train station, sulk on the train all the way to school and plonk myself in a chair, thinking "Why is the bus so smelly?", "Can the train stop stopping for 5 minutes at every stop?!", "Omg school is so boring, I just wanna go home...". Those days I admit I forget how fortunate I really am to have public transportation that sends me within 100m from my destination, trains that have a maximum of 5-minutes frequency, a school to attend (here, girls are very encouraged to go to school, phew!) 

We all have those days. But it's time to acknowledge that our little red dot has achieved a whole lot in just 48 years. 

We may still have hiccups in our public transport system. 

We may still have some housing issues in terms of too-quickly-rising prices. 

We may still find everything so expensive.

We may still have Electronic Road Pricing (ERP).  

But ultimately, to be born and bred here, has been my privilege.

Happy 48th National Day, Singapore!