DOES THE DISPARITY IN RESIDENTIAL ACCESSIBILITY TO LOCAL AMENITIES DIFFER BETWEEN MATURE AND NON-MATURE TOWNS? (A SPATIAL PERSPECTIVE)

Abstract

Housing amenities are essential in supporting community living within estates and provides urban dwellers with access to daily necessities or services. This research paper posits that there is a variation in residents’ accessibility to local amenities across space due to different generations of town planning. Singapore’s vision for a compact and carlite community has resulted in a shift towards centralised town planning, where the town centres in non-mature estates have become the “one-stop destination” to serve the needs of residents. Changes in town planning over the years, have resulted in inherent spatial and physical differences between mature and non-mature estates. This study was conducted with the objective of investigating if the extent of accessibility differs between mature and non-mature towns and to ascertain reasons that will account for this inter-town accessibility differences. The Hedonic Pricing Model was adopted to isolate the attribute of accessibility and provide easy comparison across HDB towns for this study. Through this study, house prices were found to be statistically negatively correlated with distance from town centre in both models. More importantly, it was determined that residents in mature towns did not experience as large a disparity in accessibility to amenities across space compared to non-mature towns. Qualitative spatial analysis and observations also reveal that amenities in mature towns are found to be more dispersed and in greater density as opposed to a concentration of amenities mostly found in the town centre of non-mature towns.