Creating age-friendly environments to enable ageing-in-place has attracted tremendous attention since World Health Organisation launched the Global Age-friendly Cities Project. Learned from British new towns and the Neighbourhood Unit, Singapore's public housing is planned based on abstract planning models. It is acknowledged as a success story of high-rise living and influences housing development in China and other countries. Using Yuhua East neighbourhood as a study case, this article takes a bottom-up approach to examine whether Singapore's public housing, particularly its neighbourhood spaces (i.e., neighbourhood centre, precinct centre, park and green space, void deck, community and eldercare institution, and route), match older people’ spatial experiences and everyday needs. This article argues that abstract planning models and functionalist design approaches result in car-centric planning and space fragmentation. It highlights the necessity to practice human-centric design and plan neighbourhood spaces as parts of a highly cohesive urban space system rather than fragmented pieces. © 2022 Elsevier Ltd

Trust is an essential component of any financial system, and distrust can undermine savings and economic growth. Our study draws on the Singapore Life Panel to assess how trust ties to older respondents’ (1) pension plan participation and withdrawals; (2) life, health, and long-term care insurance holdings; and (3) stock market engagement. We show that the widely-used ‘trust in people’ question is uncorrelated with household behaviours related to retirement preparedness. Instead, trust in private and public financial representatives is positively associated with pension savings, investments, and insurance holdings. Financial literacy also plays an important and consistent role in retirement decision-making.

The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted the healthcare sector in many ways. Social safety measures in hospices in Singapore include cessation of non-essential services such as volunteering. Literature shows that volunteers are valuable in enhancing the quality of life of patients in receiving hospice services. They provide patients with needed companionship, and meaningful activities such as bringing their pets into the wards in animal-assisted activities. The rise of telehealth during the COVID-19 pandemic brought an increasing interest in virtual volunteering such as virtual animal-assisted activities (VAAA). However, there is currently a lack of literature on virtual volunteering as its increased demand is a recent trend. Virtual volunteering in a hospice in Singapore is described through two retrospective case studies of VAAA. These case studies showed that a therapeutic alliance can be effectively built via virtual platforms. Benefits of virtual volunteering include enabling continued service delivery and increased comfort for some patients as virtual interactions can be less intimidating as compared to interacting with an animal in real life. Virtual volunteering may be considered to complement face-to-face volunteering in end-of-life care as part of normal practice. © 2022 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.