Uploaded on 2015-06-08 by ImadBirkholz

1. Adelaide, South Australia 2. Gold Coast, Queensland Australia 3. Singapore 4. Tokyo, Japan 5. Geneva, Switzerland **five characteristics that make a city liveable** 6. Environmental - e.g. pollution 7. Cost of living - e.g. price of goods & services 8. Transport access 9. Security 10. Communication **Describe the status of your own city** I currently live in Singapore having moved here one year ago from the Gold Coast, Australia. Singapore already is listed in my top 3 cities to live in. If there were some changes I would like to see, it would be in the area of Environmental initiatives. Singapore is a green city, yes it's beautiful, but...if you look closely there are "dark" corners of pollution. For example I participated in a Mangrove clean up. There were only 30 of us, and we had 2 hours to clean up a mangrove area in the north of Singapore. In this period of time we collected almost 1000kg of rubbish. ![Cleaning up mangroves][1] ![Almost 1000kg of rubbish collected!][2] [1]: https://edxuploads.s3.amazonaws.com/14337525558604393.jpg [2]: https://edxuploads.s3.amazonaws.com/14337526304230973.jpg Perhaps this could be addressed by improving education, as well as improving cross border relationships that focus on this issue. For example, Singapore being an island state to some degree has no control about the amount of rubbish landing on it's shores, but much of it is brought in by the tides from neighbouring countries. Singapore is also quite expensive with regards to food costs. Yes, there are cheap places to eat, but you get what you pay for. When you have cheap food courts, you know that the ingredients used are not high quality. The food court operator has to make a living and therefore cuts expenses just like any other business. I saw a food court operator place a 10l can of cooking oil on the ground. When I looked closely, it was **palm oil**! This again links in with my point on the Environment. Singaporians regularly get air pollution when Indonesian farmers burn their forests to make way for palm plantations. Singaporian people complain about the haze, and rightly so, but most wouldn't know that the very food court that they eat at uses palm oil in the production of food, that they buy so cheaply. So they are actually part of the problem. Security, communication, transport are quite excellent in Singapore.