Heartlanding

Isn't this charming? A covered wet-market, now shrouded in darkness at the end of another bustling, bountiful day, nestled amongst blocks of Singapore's truest national symbol and icon, the HDB flat, where nobody has no place to go. Top it off with frame of branches and crow in mid-flight to remind of nature's proximity and the likewise impossibility of high stress levels. May I present to you: Toa Payoh, the jewel of Town Planning. Remember well this scene of peaceful prosperity, for the next picture you will see is not so rosy.

This is Potong Pasir, an Opposition Party enclave, pockets of which still fester within our pristine Garden State. Notice the sloping resignation which characterizes the architecture - a design flawed not only by lack of urban aesthetics, but by under-optimal usage of top-floor capacity. See how, if not for unsightly tin fencing, the shamefully untended vegetation threatens to overgrow an entire estate, whose residents should be fined for mosquito breeding. But worst of all, observe the children in the foreground: they are engaged, at such tender age, in loitering. You don't find such inexcusable behaviour among the youth of Toa Payoh; in Toa Payoh they are always at home, talking to grand-parents or hard at work on the ten-year series.