My Lion City – a mega-city ………..
My Lion City – Singa-pore
Cross-ref from Prof Richard Florida at:
http://creativeclass.com/whos_your_city/whos_YOUR_city/index.php/category/your-stories/
Monday, June 23rd, 2008
In a nutshell, I have lived here for 4 decades since 1966 when I first set foot in Singapore after London. I wanted to run off but had to make Singapore my matrimonial home.
Like London which grew on me after one year, Singapore became more livable with the revolutionary changes taking place after gaining independence in 1965; so I am 1 year younger than Spore!
Within 10 years of inspiration (10%) and perspiration (90%), I could not have believed how Singapore without any natural resources except a hard working and educated people, could transform herself into a beautiful clean and green city with good infrastructure and a financial centre.
Now that Singapore has evolved into a first world country, our government finds it is time to inject creative energies into our city to become a mega-city.
Hence, the birth of the Esplanade , where I produced a benefit concert “L’Enfant Sauvage ” in 2004 , with great success.
Singapore to me is my ideal city, with an open mind to keep on improving to attract the talented to come and join us to sustain this amazing city, I now call home.
Sent by Ana Wang from Singapore
06/26/2008 at 00:22
From Seng aka Tiger Tanaka, Toronto
US citizen Richard Florida has recently taken up appointment in my alma mater, University of Toronto, on urban planning issues I believe. A vibrant, vocal and listenable man of substance in the tradition of the late Torontonin Jane Jacobs in terms of what makes for the best of livable cities.
06/26/2008 at 00:39
Jane Jacobs, OC, O.Ont (May 4, 1916 – April 25, 2006) was an American-born Canadian urbanist, writer and activist. She is best known for The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), a powerful critique of the urban renewal policies of the 1950s in the United States. The book has been credited with reaching beyond planning issues to influence the spirit of the times.
“ It may be that we have become so feckless as a people that we no longer care how things do work, but only what kind of quick, easy outer impression they give. If so, there is little hope for our cities or probably for much else in our society. But I do not think this is so. ”
— Jane Jacobs, The Death And Life of Great American Cities, 1961
“ In her book “Death and Life of Great American Cities,” written in 1961, Ms. Jacobs’s enormous achievement was to transcend her own withering critique of 20th-century urban planning and propose radically new principles for rebuilding cities. At a time when both common and inspired wisdom called for bulldozing slums and opening up city space, Ms. Jacobs’s prescription was ever more diversity, density and dynamism — in effect, to crowd people and activities together in a jumping, joyous urban jumble. ”
— Douglas Martin, The New York Times, April 25, 2006