1st Asia-Pacific Housing Forum - random ramblings

I had the privilege of attending the above forum the past two days... (tmr morning, too), organised by Habitat for Humanity International and the Singapore Institute of Planners. It's been a while since I attended any forum so international; and the exchange of ideas, the ec devt issues discussed (though all on housing) all reminded me fondly of my schooling days. Like seriously, though the crowd is very different-- mostly foreign delgates from the region (some further away) gathered to discuss issues particularly pertaining to slum upgrading, housing finance for the poor etc. My own CEO also gave a speech on home ownership in Singapore (coincidentally drafted by my perpetually-being-arrowed unit head), which, though intended as a sharing-of-ideas speech, turned out to be slightly out of place in my opinion. I couldn't help but feel the stark contrast of issues these developing countries were confronted with, VS issues we're dealing with now. Also, no doubt Sg has world-class public housing she ought to be very very proud of, but after these two days I also came to stark (and very delayed too, i guess) realisation how much effort and money the Sg govt has thrown into public housing... How given the billions we've invested in our HDB flats/estates alone it's prob also highly unlikely for any other country to easily replicate how we 'did it' in Sg. Plus we're so small. Another very good point raised during the panel discussions about why we 'have it easy' is the political stability and continuity in Sg... (one naive and rather insensitive middle-aged Singaporean participant in one of group discussions kept saying how it's very simple for other countries to do what we did in Sg, leading someone to rebutt saying how sg is not like say in Africa/Latin America whereby you can get military coup/ frequent change in govt) which makes it far easier to ensure that ppl's land/property rights are protected/ for govt to further build on what they had delivered earlier... Every Singaporean (esp HDB dwellers) should come and attend this forum man, then they will know not to take public housing for granted.

Forum also made me seriously wonder if not being able to really effect huge changes at work was a reason for my occasional "demoralisation"... As in, public housing in Singapore is already so 'developed' that frequently you're just like routinely implementing things or making small improvements to very established systems, whose impact on your customers you also cannot see. On the other hand, just listening to some fellow counterparts at seminar was quite inspiring- NGOs/companies developing environmentally sustainable building materials (eg. recycling debris, using bamboo as building material), experts from the devt field sharing some successful field experiences in various developing countries. Maybe this is a very selfish kinda approach to getting work satisfaction, but yeah, I seldom feel like I'm helping ppl who really need it... if at all! Worse still, get complaints...