No not the final frontier. I'd like to bring up living space especially since I've been pouring over the weekend classifieds looking for a suitable flat of late. I think I need a 3 bedroom 1000 square foot space. Some would say unnecessary but I'd like it. Space to not clutter the bedroom, space to lounge around in front of the TV, space to keep empty. Waste of money some would say, with the cost of housing jumping over the moon. But therein also lies the advantage. The bigger the piece of the pie you get now the more valuable it will be later. Cash in and retire in Phuket.
The other subplot in bringing up living space is the result of having visited a friend's apartment in Hong Kong in February. It was in a fantastic location - from the living room window one can see across to Hong Kong Island from Kowloon. Awesome. What I couldn't get used to was the fact it was a mere 700 square feet. There was the tiniest kitchen I ever saw plus 3 tiny bedrooms. Amazing. To think that HKers were surviving in living spaces as cramped as these for decades, it blew my mind. In Singapore, we're used to larger space, even if we had our surroundings built vertically. Our 3 room flats, the smallest HDB dwellings for quite some time before the introduction of granny flats, are about 70 square metres and that's larger than the space my friend was living in for a couple of years in Hong Kong!
This was an education for me, a study in constraints and acceptance. What does growing up in a small space do for one's psyche? Does the small space make you long for Australia's or Canada's wide open wilderness? Perhaps not if you were never exposed to mind boggling expanses. Would it limit your ability to think out of the box? Perhaps not. HKers are pretty creative when it comes to getting things done. Are they narrow minded? Maybe some. But they have the freest economy in the world adn that isn't a product of inwardness. Maybe the small space make one develop socially very quickly. There's no running away from other people, no gap to prevent interaction, no barrier to the noise and smells of the city. Everything out there in your face. I bet one grows up pretty fast in a cramped city. The fight for space is also what makes the HK island skyline so fantastic. Vertical giants popping up in the tiniest of corners and rising hundreds of meters in the air, competing for recognition and perhaps survival. The only way there is up.
I don't know if Singapore could handle the minute sizes. We are seeing tiny pigeon hole apartments popping up in the city of late. HK size abodes to cater to the single movers and shakers. It's a change we have to accept and deal with. But here I am looking for a 1000 sq feet to grow old in. Perhaps we are a young country with more vertical transformation in store. But we hold our green space dear. Trees and spaces and sky and sea. We need these things to keep sane. As the gahmen tries to bolster the population to 6.5 million to keep the economy going and Singapore going, some have come to ask if the sacrifice of space is necessary. Yes and no I guess. There a finite piece of land to make babies and miracles in. There's still room to breathe and smell the roses. But finite. Still requires some figuring out.
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