Not being an architect, and speaking from a lay-person’s perspective, I have to wonder at the wisdom behind much of Macau’s newer public housing estates.
Is there a master plan for the city and its sisters Taipa and Coloane? Is there a method behind the madness of city zoning?
It seems to me that subsidized housing is being built in great ghettos – case in point the 3 vast estates that sit, carved into the Coloane hills, cheek by jowl, isolated at the end of the CoTai strip. Built in such high density that the inner blocks with their lack of airflow, lack of light, and closeness to neighbours front and back that you can almost touch their washing lines, promises a rather miserable existence.
It cant have gone un-noticed by those who are gradually moving into these estates that at the other end of the strip high on a hill stands a luxurious, marble edifice, One GrandTai, for those who can afford the HKD10,000 a square foot. Is there a symbolic splitting of the ‘have’s’ and ‘have not’s’, one end of CoTai to the other?
Environment aside, what consideration has been given to the psychological effect on people who are herded into these blocks? A sense of Them and Us pervades, second class citizens kept separate from the rest of the community.
An elderly Chinese lady I know who has a market stall in the Barra area has recently been allocated a 1 bedroom flat in the CoTai public estate. Feeling as if ripped from the bosom of her old yellow market community, she’ll never go and live there – “what would I do living so far away from my family and friends?” she says.
And the giant pink and blue wall of an estate that’s been built in central Taipa between the cemetery and the so-called luxury apartments Pacifica Gardens. Like a tsunami wave it looms over the neighbourhood reducing light, air. Again, I’m no architect, but I would have thought that some holes punched into the middle of these buildings could improve the natural ventilation no end, and give a more architecturally pleasing look to the place.
Is this another example of segmenting the working class from the well heeled?
We ought to take note of places like Tin Shui Wan in Hong Kong where there is block after block after block of nothing but public housing; referred to as ‘the sad town’, it has the highest recorded level of suicides, domestic violence, single mothers and drug users.
Public housing needs to be better blended into the wider community. Lessons can be learned from Singapore’s HDB low cost housing developments. In efforts to promote social cohesion and patriotism and to prevent social stratificationthat could lead to social conflict, housing of different income groups have been mixed together in estates and new towns. Most of these estates have an abundance of trees, gardens and community gathering spots especially for the ‘oldies’ and are much sought after homes.
Macau has managed to achieve this assimilation to quite a successful degree with the housing built on top of the line of shops along the Old Taipa Village main road. Low rise, attractive external facades, relatively low density blocks behind. Many of our expatriate clients with decent housing allowances ask about them and look longingly to rent there amongst the hustle and bustle of life in the village.
As in Singapore in the 1990s I’d like to see more government intervention on the upgrading of existing older flats, installing new facilities such as lifts, waterproofing and painting crumbly old building exteriors, helping the less well advantaged to stay living in the communities they’ve grown up in.
And for goodness sakes, to have more empathy for those who are now unable to catch the wave of property prices to buy their own homes; not to stereotype, or treat them as pariahs but to provide more aesthetically pleasing buildings that gives them a sense of pride to call home.
