Social Stratification Mappers Home
Exploring Inequality’s Geographic Dimension Across Neighbourhoods in Singapore: It's Driving Forces & Touch Points
Background on Inequality
Tackling inequality has always been Singapore’s long-term challenge since her early years of independence. The introduction of housing grants and compulsory education in the 1960s helped citizens move up the economic ladder, where we see an increase in housing ownership and education level across the decades. Today, Singapore’s PISA scores remain one of the highest in the world, with students from low income backgrounds performing better than their counterparts in other countries [1].
Yet, inequality–defined as a lack of fair treatment in the sharing of wealth or opportunities –had recently been declared a national priority in Singapore. As society progresses, inequality goes beyond the economics and the educational aspects. Race was highlighted as an important dimension of inequality, with the emergence of ethnic enclaves in Housing and Development Board (HDB) estates in the 1980s. Back then, towns like Bedok and Tampines had more than 30% Malay households. This was followed by the introduction of the Ethnic Integration Policy, a racial quota to ensure ethnic mix and break up communal enclaves [2].
Why Tackling Inequality Is Important
However, whether Singapore today has attained race equality continues to be questioned. Whether citizens saw themselves as ‘race-blind’ became a hot question with the controversy over the reserved Presidential Elections. This leads to the first dimension of inequality that calls for attention – Race. Secondly, the intergenerational divide – that is, the dimension of Age – became of increasing awareness in 2017. We see increasing efforts to bond elderly and youths, such as efforts to pair preschools with eldercare centres, as well as community programmes for intergenerational bonding. Thirdly, while we have attained good progress in home ownership, “what type of homes do citizens own” is another dimension of inequality. Housing Type is thus one indicator that reflects one’s wealth level, that can be looked into when analysing inequality across neighbourhoods.
Race, age and housing type are three important dimensions to better understand the driving forces behind social inequality. In particular, we analysed the geographic aspect [3] of these dimensions of social inequality. We present SocialMapper – a dynamic and interactive geovisual analytics dashboard. Our aim is to provide town planners with a geovisual analytics tool for them to discover inequality patterns from demographic data.
What to Expect
This Wiki Page reports on our development effort to design a web-enabled geospatial tool for supporting the analysis and visualisation needs of an urban planning professional. It consists of six sections.
Section 1 provides a general introduction of the paper. This is followed by an overview of the motivation and objectives of our research effort. Section 3 provides a review of analytical mapping techniques for visualising and analysing data. The social segregation index technique used to design SocialMapper is also discussed in this section. Section 4 explains the design architecture including the visual and architectural design framework. In Section 5, the practical use of the SocialMapper is demonstrated using a set of demographic and amenities data. Lastly, the paper concludes by highlighting the future direction of the research.
