A Potong Pasir for Our Elderly

How well do you know Potong Pasir? Most of us must be rather familiar with the Potong Pasir neighborhood where our school is located - Which shop to go to for the best chicken rice, what time to avoid the queue at McDonald’s, or what is the most shaded route to get to the MRT. But as we walk to and fro school everyday,we almost never stop to ask ourselves whether the neighbourhood caters to the needs of the senior citizens. To gain a better understanding about this issue, as part of our Geographical Investigation (GI), our group of 5 Geography students set out to conduct observations and interviews in Potong Pasir, to assess the neighbourhood’s friendliness to its elderly.

How far does the built environment of Potong Pasir meet the social and physical needs of its elderly residents?

During the course of two days, we conducted physical observations of the area as well as surveying its residents to get a more holistic view of our research question.

Day 1

The day was devoted to mapping out the area, taking photos of interesting locations and giving a general score for Potong Pasir’s physical and built environments.

Using a scoring table (bipolar survey) like this,

We assessed the different chosen locations in the neighborhood, and then compute the overall score for Potong Pasir by taking the average. We ended up with the results as follows:

As we can see, Potong Pasir scored positively for all aspects, indicating that the area has satisfactory physical and built environment, and has sufficient amenities. However, during our observation, we also noticed a wide difference between the conditions of different locations in the neighbourhood. For example, public venues like the Food Courts and the Community Centre tend to score higher compared to the private housing areas. Especially for the private housing area, we observed uneven sidewalks, very few ramps and non-slip features, as well as limited drainage. We came to the conclusion that unlike the local government, contractors for the private housing area might not have prioritized or considered the needs of the elderly, thus resulting in the area being rather unfriendly for senior citizens.

Day 2

On day 2, our group proceeded with our investigation, this time surveying the area’s residents, asking for their opinions on Potong Pasir’s natural environment, Built facilities, Inclusiveness and Safety. Understanding that the elderly would be conversing primarily in Mandarin/other Chinese dialects, we prepared our questionnaire to be bilingual to make the process more convenient. However, we still faced some difficulties trying to explain the more complicated concepts to the elderly, especially when only half of us spoke Chinese. Nevertheless, with a lot of effort (and occasionally hand gestures), we managed to gather a sizable number of responses for our project. Using a scale from 1 to 5, we asked the residents to rate Potong Pasir’s various aspects, including cleanliness, noise level, availability of facilities, and level of engagement in the community. The results are as follows:

This set of results shows that Potong Pasir indeed caters to the needs of the elderly, scoring overall 4.01/5, answering our research question that the built environment of Potong Pasir meets the social and physical needs of its elderly residents.

However, of greater interest to us, were the actual conversations that we had with the residents, which gave us a lot more insights into the lives of the elderly that we could never have learnt from just looking at numbers alone.

Even though we expected the answers to vary between respondents depending on their age and where they live, we were surprised to learn how starkly different their answers can be because of their personalities and level of involvement in the community. We met an uncle who was very satisfied with every aspect of living in Potong Pasir, yet just two blocks down the road we talked to a displeased elderly who found the cost of living to be too high and staying near schools to be a nuisance. Talking to a member of the committee of the Potong Pasir Community Centre helped us to understand the myriad of activities and initiatives to foster better interaction and inclusion between the elderly; yet a quiet uncle sitting alone told us that there wasn’t any avenue for him to actively engage in the community. This further shows how liveability is a very subjective and personal concept, because even though all of our respondents belong to the same demographic group in terms of age, ethnicity, and neighborhood, they still experience the living environment very differently.

Despite its small scale, our investigation opened our eyes to our very own school’s neighbourhood as well as the lives of its elderly residents. We are better able to comprehend how building a liveable city for all remain a challenge as individual experiences are highly diverse, and thus government’s efforts will not be received equally well by all. Nevertheless, we should continue to strive to create a friendly and liveable environment for all, as part of Singapore’s main sustainable development goals to be inclusive and considerate for its senior citizens.