Archive for the ‘Housing’ Category
Mind your own backyard
Botanical Pride: A small plot of land behind a residential block converted into a garden by retiree Mr Phua. One month ago, the town council built a small fence, which Mr Phua said help deter plant thieves. He himself plays his role as an obedient citizen by following the town council’s instructions to house the plants in pots and not plant them into the soil. While the land principally belonged to the state, Mr Phua and few other gardening-enthusiast residents have took landscaping responsibilities upon themselves, transforming it into a mini-sanctuary and personal leisure ground.
Invading the void deck
Void deck of Block 216, Tampines Street 23, 2008
Last night, I went to a nearby Macdonald’s outlet in hope of getting a shot of its service counter (I will explain in a future post why this shot is relevant to the project). I chose to go late at night as I wanted a less crowded shot. As my carelessness would have it, the battery on my film camera went flat, and I had to leave the restaurant without an exposure and a wasted $2.30 spent on a regular ice milo (for looking like a normal patron).
On my way home, I had to pass by a void deck which I had been walking through for the last 15 years. It was only last night that I paid attention to its wall paintings. I was struck by the mural (above) and the symbolic meaning it now has for me. Since the age of 12, like Justin, I have been faithfully disobeying the signs at void decks that prohibit football. I remember breaking a few of those fluorescent lamps that hung on the roofs of the void decks. I thought that the void deck will be a wasted space if me and my football team were disallowed from using it as an indoor football pitch. Like many other football players of my time, I had been waging a war against the authorities (police patrols, lower-storey flat tenants and bangladeshi cleaners) since adolescence to reclaim the void deck as a part of public space that no one else seemed to be using. Just like how old folks, idle at home, began to move their own furniture into a small space on the other side of the same block where they congregate to chat and play cards.
Today, we have outdoor street soccer courts to play in. But I would like to think that I was part of the force that triggered the revelation in the minds of urban planners that urban boys too need a playground of their own. Like the professor said, rule-breakers like I was 12 years ago may just be people ahead of their time.
Void deck of Block 216, Tampines Street 23, 2008
With the sprouting of new flats, interesting murals like these are becoming rarer. I do not know who were the brainchilds for these murals, but I suspect they were a result of urban planning authorities’ effort to encourage and rekindle a kind of spirit which they felt lack in housing estates. Notice the racial diversity too, and how it reflects the race quote policy that the HDB enforces. The irony is that this mural of a nature setting welcomes residents into a Residents’ Committee centre, built indoors and air-conditioned. Even more ironic is how RCs nowadays are increasingly going underground, as bomb-shelters are transformed into resident meeting centres. Some of these resident meeting centres even double up as tuition centres. To be fair though, the urbanising trend seems to be reversing, with the push for more garden estates like Punggol 21.
