This is Home, truly ...

All quotes from Hong Xinyi, "Home is a City to Love," Straits Times 10 October 2008: A33.

'Personally, I like eternal cities: not ones that are frozen in time, but ones where changes are firmly rooted in the city's own traditions and idiosyncrasies, with identities beyond the vagaries of what hip jet-setters consider cool at any particular moment.
As for a home that morphs from casino kingdom to race circuit to aviation playground to marina central with the influx of each new tide of revellers -- it seems to me that such a city, hollowed out for easy access to shallow new identities, will be very difficult to love.'

'But it would be nice, after months of hearing about expensive race cars and visiting celebrities, to revisit the notion that this is not just a place that hosts events.'

'"They're not building things that will become places people care about ... Home is wherever you want it to be."'

Where's the common thread? Perhaps it's that home is a subjective construct, built by each individual out of an intensely personal collection of memories. No amount of marketing and propaganda can create or induce a sense of one. Maybe that's what people mean when they say that Singapore is not a good home because it lacks a "soul": that they do not have so many memories invested here, or the bits that tie them down here have been swept away, renovated, redeveloped, repackaged into something completely unfamiliar.