Top view: A visitor taking in the sight of Kuala Lumpur from an observation deck on top of one of the city’s high-rises. — AP
Many visitors to Kuala Lumpur go up the 421m-high KL Tower for glittering views of Malaysia’s capital city.
For my family on a recent trip, the highlight came at the end of our dinner at the tower’s revolving restaurant.
A waiter brought over a complimentary piece of birthday cake for my older daughter, who had just turned eight. We sang the song, she blew out the candles and offered a portion to the cheery Malaysian family of three – a couple in their 40s with a teenage son – at the table next to ours.
When we finished, we waved goodbye and made our way out. As we waited for the lift, the woman from the neighbouring table hurried over.
She began with an apology. “I am sorry, I don’t have a hongbao, a red packet.”
She held out a plain brown envelope to my daughter. On it, the words “Happy Birthday!” were hastily written in blue ballpoint ink. “It is just to wish you good health and to grow up well,” she told my daughter.
I was so startled – and I regret it – that I did not have the presence of mind to ask the woman for her name. I thanked her profusely and had my child accept her well wishes.
Downstairs, my daughter opened the envelope. There was a RM20 (S$6) note.
Back home in Singapore, it sits in her “money jar” – a dash of orange amid the swirl of purple S$2 notes that she has saved from her recess allowance over the past year. It is a vivid reminder of the spontaneous warmth shown by a stranger in a strange city.
I told my husband, who was working that evening, what had happened. “It’s ren qing wei,” he said succinctly, using a Mandarin term that is perhaps best yet inadequately translated as “the human touch”. We were treated with kindness by someone who did not have to offer it, and who did not stand to gain anything from it. There was nothing remotely transactional or premeditated about it.
It made us feel cared for – in that detached sense of the connection that one human being could have for another simply as a fellow human being.
And that, in turn, made us feel a great deal of warmth towards the city that we were in.
Across the world, the idea of a “liveable city” has gained great currency in at least the past decade.
A plethora of rankings – by periodicals, relocation service providers, sociologists – dish up various cities deemed the best places to live in.
Each year, for instance, the Economist Intelligence Unit runs a Global Liveability Index, which ranks cities across five categories: stability, healthcare, culture and environment, education and infrastructure. Last year, Vienna topped the list of 173 cities for the third time in five years.
Singapore came in 37th, and also performs well in smaller-scale surveys such as those conducted by Mercer, ECA International and Monocle. They all offer comparisons of what life in each city could be like, generally from the perspective of expatriates, but also of relevance to Singaporeans, looking at factors from personal safety and air quality to censorship and climate.
One for the album: People having their photographs taken under cherry blossoms in Tokyo. — AFP
On home ground, a Singapore Liveability Framework was drawn up by the Centre for Liveable Cities (CLC), established by the ministries for national development and sustainability and the environment.
Its desired outcomes – important guideposts for Singapore policymakers – are:
> a competitive economy so as to attract investments and provide jobs;
> a sustainable environment to ensure survival despite limited natural resources;
> a high quality of life, including the social and psychological well-being of the population. What this means has changed over the years, from basic needs such as sanitation to personal security, recreational options and, today, a sense of community, culture and identity.
Former CLC executive director Khoo Teng Chye noted that many of the cities that are considered liveable tend to exist in large geographical spaces with low-rise developments, low population densities and low-polluting industries.
“Cities such as Sydney and Vancouver are often cited in this regard,” he wrote in a book on the framework.
“Singapore, however, is one of the outliers, combining highly dense urban structures with high standards of living.”
This is hardly an achievement to be taken lightly, even as ever-evolving challenges from housing affordability to societal schisms arise, necessitating a constant juggling act of political and policy solutions.
Singapore is a highly liveable city, and Singapore strains every sinew to keep it so.
But is it a lovable one? What makes a city lovable?
One Singapore government agency has sought to map out a spectrum of how one might feel emotionally connected to the city.
DesignSingapore Council, which sits under the Economic Development Board, birthed a project with the rather unromantic name of Loveability Framework.
But it offers some helpful suggestions of how one might love a city. They include attraction (feeling excited about what it has to offer), attachment (feeling familiar with it), agency (feeling that we can influence change), connection (feeling affection for others), inclusion (feeling that we are fairly treated) and freedom (feeling free to express and be ourselves).
It’s not meant to be prescriptive – the fastest way to kill any romance. The ways we love a city are as complex as ourselves, and as disparate as our individual experiences.
As Singaporeans, we may feel an emotional attachment to our home, because this is where our roots are, and where our family and friends live. It is where we have built relationships, including with the community outside our immediate circles. Its story is our story, and vice versa.
To some extent, the lockdown strengthened those bonds because we stayed put on this island and had the time to invest in them. One silver lining of the past three years for me is the budding friendship I struck up with an elderly florist at a nearby market because I went to her stall so often to pick up blooms to beautify our home.
But putting aside those relationships that are nurtured over time and which help us feel connected to our city, I do wonder how easy a city is Singapore to love instinctively, and what we can do to make it a more lovable one.
Some suggestions lie outside our borders. As the world emerges from the pandemic and travel returns with a vengeance, it is an opportunity to experience again other cities.
A Singaporean artist, Y. Tham, writes on her Instagram account of a recent visit to Hong Kong.
“Hong Kong has so many textures I felt dizzy trying to take it all in as I walked about the Central districts yesterday.
“The word I think of is ‘palimpsest’ – a manuscript where there’s been a layering of text over one another across time, by different authors and maybe even different languages. You can try to decipher each layer individually – but it’s like a puzzle where bits have been erased or are illegible.
“What makes a city ‘lovable’ is when the ordinary lives and creativity of its inhabitants are not completely erased over time, but layered over in a manner where you see traces and shadows of its people – of how the city has suffered and survived and lived, and hence, how it has been loved.”
I understood what she meant because I was among Hong Kong’s pantheon of lovers. My family lived there for just a few years and we have not been back since 2019, but I knew parts of it intimately, as I traced its streets and wandered its alleys. Unlike in Singapore where many of us get around encased in air-conditioned cars and are literally removed from the ground, we used the public transport there frequently and walked daily.
The appeal of such journeys is enhanced because the city wears its history and experiences, good or bad, making for sometimes surprising, always edifying, discoveries. This has its costs though, when for instance development is stunted, affecting the liveability of the city.
The cities in Japan are worth my infatuation for a different reason: their public toilets. I love my children and I love that when they need to go – which young children do, at frequent and unexpected moments – a clean toilet is always available, whether it is in a small zoo in Hokkaido or a crowded train station in Tokyo.
When a city’s people treat their public spaces like their homes, the city becomes lovable because of the love, care and consideration its denizens bestow on it.
I am less familiar with Kuala Lumpur – having not been there for over a decade, and did not instinctively feel it to be one that is lovable, at least to me. But that one unexpected interaction with the Malaysian family has opened up the possibilities in the relationship.
So, clearly, there are many ways for a city to be lovable, and every individual will have their own love language.
What bears thinking about for each and every one of us is: What is it that we seek to want to feel more of from our city, and what are we doing about it. — The Straits Times/ANN
