Dr. Louisa-May Khoo
S8E6: “In the space between progress and belonging.”
In our season finale, we sit with Dr. Louisa May Khoo, an urban planner, storyteller, and compassionate observer of humanity, to explore what truly shapes how we live, age, remember, and belong. Through deeply thoughtful reflections on Singapore’s evolution, the transformation of iconic Chinatown spaces, and the unseen emotional costs of progress, she helps us consider how memory, place, and identity are forever intertwined. We discuss loneliness, loss, resilience, and the quiet ache that accompanies aging, alongside the extraordinary power of community and connection in restoring meaning. Dr. Khoo introduces her powerful lens of “hardware, software, and heartware,” reminding us that compassionate systems require both thoughtful infrastructure and everyday human care.
Together, we reflect on grief, migration, generational inheritance, and the stories we carry forward, sometimes unknowingly. We explore the kinds of conversations families avoid, the truths buried beneath politeness, and the necessity of courage in speaking honestly with one another. And we end with a reflection on what it means to be an audience - the idea that listening, witnessing, and receiving a story completes it.
This episode is tender, intellectual, grounding, and deeply human. It invites us not only to think differently about aging and community, but to hold our elders, our neighbourhoods, our histories, and one another with renewed reverence.
About Our Guest:
Dr. Louisa-May Khoo investigates the intersections of urban change and social wellbeing with a focus on racial justice and planning for longevity. A veteran of public governance and housing policy, her international career trajectory spans academic research, planning practice and community advocacy. She brings an attentiveness to the humanistic register through her work, what she calls the other A.I., an 'anthropological intelligence' grounded in memory, relationships, lived experiences and the rhythms of everyday life. It is a belief that such a humanistic perspective gives voice to the coalescence of grievances and hope, providing openings for reconciliation, forgiveness and possibility to foster thriving societies. Dr. Khoo holds a PhD in Planning from the University of British Columbia and is currently a Senior Planner with the City of Maple Ridge in British Columbia, Canada.
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Episode Transcript
ANIKA
Welcome back to Root & Seed, a podcast about tradition seekers who are sparked to explore, define, and celebrate their family and cultural identity. I'm your host, Anika Chabra. What a treat last episode was with Karen and Simran Mann, the mother and daughter duo, who so gracefully allowed us to witness the exchange between them.
And as if that wasn't enough, they then share the stories of their elders to help us understand that we in fact become the audience of the people who raise us if we just spend time to absorb and reflect. But what about the community in which we live and were raised in the neighborhoods that include the people, the places, the things, the physical, social and emotional infrastructure.
We couldn't help to think that there had to be a role for that important influence that led us right to today's guest, Dr. Louisa May Khoo.
By profession. Dr. Louisa May Khoo is an urban planner in Maple Ridge, BC by life's work. She has spent the last decade helping to dig into aging, governance, social housing, diversity issues, and community engagement. She has helped to recreate the familiar so that our landscapes allow our elders to reminisce, while also motivating the newer generations to appreciate their sacrifice for progress.
Because urban planning is about change, but at what cost? With incredible respect and empathy. Dr. Khoo explores the clash of modernization versus tradition.
This is a longer episode, but with good reason. It's a large topic with layers upon layers of complexity. Yet Dr. Louisa May Khoo explains it so eloquently using the stories of her research and the stories of humanity to illustrate. Let's start from the beginning.
ANIKA
Dr. Khoo, thank you so much for being on the Root and Seed Podcast.
DR. LOUISA MAY KHOO
Oh, thank you for having me. I'm so excited to be here.
ANIKA
Let's talk a little bit about, some of the work that you've done early on with your doctoral research what led you to focus in on mental health inequality and the suicide rates amongst seniors in Singapore?
DR. LOUISA MAY KHOO
I think that's a great place to start because I, myself, had gone on a sort of professional and research trajectory and I was always working for the public service in Singapore and working on aging planning.
But when the opportunity came up for me to pursue a doctorate, I was struck by how when we were doing so much in Singapore retrofitting the landscape, making sure there were no bombs, and seniors could move around as well as in healthcare. Yet the suicide rates year on year for seniors kept going up. Something was amiss. And we were also hearing anecdotal stories from colleagues about how frontline agencies were seeing repeated customers at their counters, mainly seniors and older adults for a variety of sort of minute issues. And on a regular basis, they would come twice a week, for little, little things. Or the service lines would be jammed and flooded by seniors who just seemed to want to check. So this pointed to sort of a broader social happening alluding to primarily, I think, loneliness. That is really the number one illness, I think among seniors. Especially when we are seeing accelerating aging rates in many parts of the world including Canada. And so I thought that for my doctoral research, I want to really dig into this and look at how mental stress or grieving, as I put it, was very much a component of aging and how it became the owners and the responsibility for larger society to step up and to do something.
ANIKA
Often this is a component that has not been addressed, so I I love that you did this.In what ways did you feel that the research and the outcomes of your research confronted common assumptions or blind spots, about aging and the role of community and connection?
DR. LOUISA MAY KHOO
Singapore was a British colony.And after the Second World War, after the British withdrew, Singapore was very much a slum city, right? So in the 1960s when the independent government took over, one of the key promises made to the people was to have housing to clean up the central business district, to wipe out diseases like malaria and put in place sanitation and so on and so forth. And so there was a real big push towards redevelopment and ensuring that everyone was housed, which is great. And the seniors that I became very involved with and that interviewed today, so like in the 2000s were actually the youngs of the 1960s and they were the ones who basically were your teenagers who were out there working the streets and trying to make a living and trying to feed their families and send their kids to school. And so it was really on the backs of this senior generation that the entire city of Singapore was built, right? It was the “Miracle Slum to Global City” story. And it was the sacrifice of this generation. And what intrigued me was really how, despite going through all that change and being so hungry for change in their younger years, when they were in their older years they hankered for what was lost. It seemed so vivid and so fresh in their memory. And they would go back to the places that they felt like their childhood was and so I think we tend to see the benefits or we tend to have a narrative where progress is always great and in, in many ways it is.
But I think that has to also be balanced with the loss and the sacrifice that people go through in giving up what they had and in charting that new journey for themselves, which of course, they do reap benefits from. But there is a social cost to all of this that I think we are now seeing through a live course approach through coming back full circle for this generation in particular because they worked through all of that. So that for me, in doing the research back in Singapore, in Chinatown that was particularly powerful, particularly poignant because now I see these seniors back in Chinatown, which has been kept for tourist purposes.
So all the shop houses are beautifully decorated and painted and they're kept intact pretty much. But then it is contrasted with these old bodies, you know, with wrinkles, playing chess. And they would come from all over the city to Chinatown to just smell the sites, you know, be familiar with the alleyways, which are no longer alleyways, but are like paved pedestrian touristy traps and souvenir shops.
But they still want to hang out there, right? With their friends. And so for me that was trying to recreate something even though that landscape was different but still felt familiar.
ANIKA
Let's talk a little bit more about Chinatown and what you observed when you went there and what you feel might be the role that it's playing in people's lives. You talked about vantage points, right? So the vantage point of them being in the present day. What was the role of the reminiscing that was happening and the recreating that was happening in front of your very eyes, in those Chinatowns?
DR. LOUISA MAY KHOO
Firstly what I tried to do was to take a life course approach to look at aging, not as a point in time, but as how the experience of aging was really accumulative.
Sort of agglomeration of everything that you've experienced from your early childhood years to your youth, to family formation and to now in your later part of your life course, right? And how reconciling aging became, in some cases, grieving, right? We see that reflected in the landscape in people's behaviors. And I wanted to therefore shine a light on the social cause. And sacrifice of progress as a planner and as an urban designer and very much in policy practice, we often talk about placemaking, placemaking is about the icons, the landmark building, the mural on the wall, the fancy streets.
The lampposts and street furniture and so on and so forth. But really it's the people, right? It's the people, the memories that they have that now they try to play out in that certain space. Even those places sort of shape and are morphed over time. People bring back those memories, live those places and I wanted to therefore redefine placemaking as something very real, very raw, very embedded in people's everyday life, right?
So it's about the rhythms of how we choreograph our errands, how we drop our kids off at school, you know, how we run after the bus. For the seniors, I find that they seem to be trying to relive that choreography and for them, that is why Chinatown is placed, even though it's entirely run by, you know, pups and cars, K bus and souvenir shops. But they still want to recreate that in their mind and in their bodies in that space. And I think for me, everything sort of got encapsulated in that image of Chinatown.
And when I did my research here in Vancouver, I was hit by COVID. So I had to pivot. The world shut down. I couldn't travel back to Singapore and I was wondering how am I supposed to interview seniors and to get a glimpse into their lives. So I managed to get my hands on an archival oral history and they had hours and hours of storytelling by seniors who had recollected their lives in the 1960s and 1970s. Even prior to that, right? Where Chinatown was vibrant they had street markets. It was a residential neighborhood.
And of course how that has changed to become a tourist destination. And through their voices I managed to get a glimpse into their world through these oral histories. And so when I went back to Singapore at the tail end of COVID and I walked those streets again, the voices, the images that they painted through the oral histories, like they all came to life for me. The sounds, the voices cracking when they spoke of how change had really upended their lifestyles.But yet seeing those bodies in the flesh on those five foot ways playing chess, for instance
I'll tell you a funny story. I was the only girl among the sea of seniors, mostly men. And I was watching them play Chinese chess, there were bets placed and someone spied me out of the corner and said, okay, girl, it's your turn now. And so I was invited to play.I was of course completely demolished. And I lost 20 bucks. But just that invitation into their world, into their sense making for me remains one of the most precious memories from that trip back home.
ANIKA
You paint such a beautiful picture and I can just imagine the exchange between you and some of the older adults there.Is there anything that just surprised you or was it all a reinforcement of what you were expecting and imagining?
DR. LOUISA MAY KHOO
I think yes and no. Right? Like, if we were to go back to my own roots I am ethnically Chinese on my father's side. My paternal grandfather came from China. And so while some had sailed north, for instance, to Canada and to the Americas, my grandfather had decided they would sail south, right? So from China, they sail to Vietnam, to Thailand, and then to Singapore. And he came with his brother and his brother, when they made a protocol in Haja, which was in Thailand, the brother decided, okay, this is going to be my home. But my grandfather had decided that no, he would want to sail on to Singapore. And so he did. And Singapore was really not known on the map. It was a slum as I said. But it was very, very vibrant. And his first job was really just sleeping on the five foot waves and learning how to basket weave from someone that he met.And so when the man passed away, my grandfather then took that spot and then wove baskets for a living. That was my paternal side of the story.
But my mother's side was actually indigenous. They were what they call peran.
So on my mother's side they've lived in Southeast Asia for generations and generations. And we are, I guess, quite familiar with sort of the indigenous kind of histories.
When my mother was growing up, she was very ready to be modern and abandoned those sorts of roots because sadly, that generation was very much ashamed of their indigenous sort of history, just because of the way it was. And so she was dressed in denim and cut out jeans. And so when I came along, I was also the young baby hippy who was dressed in jeans and denim attire and then my maternal grandfather, they were from a privileged household and was frowning at the daughter and saying, you know, how dare you dress my granddaughter in cutout clothes? And do you not have enough money to buy her silk and velvet and it stuck because to this day, I actually don't wear jeans anymore…well thanks to my maternal grandfather.
But I guess the moral there that I was trying to convey was how through the generations, what is seen as priceless. It's very different, right? Like for my mother, it was about keeping up with the times. And that was completely different from my grandparent generation where they still wanted to cherish traditions.
And so that clash of modernization versus tradition, new versus old, um, and then embedded through that, interwoven with it is of course culture and tradition and I'm really intrigued by how, despite progress, despite modernization, despite development…what actually is lost, right? What has been swept away? And so I think this sort of era of growth is really trying to uncover that and I think that's where you come in and the work that you do is so critical, because I think it is the benefits of conversation, of storytelling, both within the family environment and outside of that, that we get to try and rediscover or reconcile what we have lost and rediscover maybe how, in spite of that change, what are those priceless nuggets that we want to keep, recover what we feel is meaningful and sensible and pass that down right regeneratively through the generations to come.
And I think no one, there's no one size fits all. There's no manual, no one knows what the answer is. Something like that is so personal. It's so within the family as part of the traumas that we endure, the dramas that we get into in a family setting and, and how we, we talk about these things, how we learn to reconcile with each other, how we make sense of where we are and who we are.
ANIKA
Thank you Dr. Khoo. That's just wonderful to hear given all your expertise. You know, if I may, one of the things I gleaned from just listening to you, just so poetically, you know, speak about your early day influences on your present day sense of self is I think there's a misnomer in story capture and, and even memoir writing that it's a one and done. I feel like there's this discovery and rediscovery as you go through different life stages as well. And I think that's the beauty of telling, retelling, revisiting these conversations that otherwise to your point, are going to be lost, if they're gonna evolve and change and your relationship with that is going to change as well.
And probably one of the reasons why I think we continue to encourage people to do these, these acts of conversation and rediscovery and looking at things often.
Because I think there is some of that healing that you talk about happening, but that sense making that you were talking about too, right? What does this actually mean in the grand scheme of things and the permission that you're giving in the way that you expressed it, the permission for people to do that at different stages of our lives, I think is incredibly important.
DR. LOUISA MAY KHOO
Exactly right. And everything I think starts from the home and is built from the home outwards into society.
And I think if we don't hone the ability from the home to actually know how to deal with difficult conversations, we can't take that out into the workplace and into larger society to manage those conversations on a larger scale.And that worries me, right? Just because of where we are at, where certain things seem too difficult to talk about.Where we try to couch them in niceties, disguise them as superficial and that richness of discovery, of understanding, of honesty, I think is lost and I sense that, right? Like I feel like the social norms to some degree in us, to always have easier conversations?
We don't want to be confrontational in the workplace, but sometimes, especially when we are managing diversity, when people are from different cultures, like in Canada, right? And just like in Singapore where there are many newcomers across the planet that come and live together, I think those conversations are necessary.
That's societal progress for me.
And I think it's so exciting to discover another perspective.
And I feel like we lose all of that when we just have easy conversations, right? We don't learn anymore. And I think that's what your toolkit sort of provides, right? Because when we learn storytelling, when we learn to manage conversations within bounds, but with authenticity, right? I think we gain so much more.
ANIKA
I wish I could tell you, Dr. Khoo, that we had a master plan to work into the workplace, but people just started to take our family conversation cards into lunch rooms and into icebreakers and asked us to do some workshops to help facilitate some of that storytelling and understanding of individuals and to your point, how culture and family and upbringing and all those things influence how you show up at work. And so I wish I could tell you as part of some big master strategy or, or business planning on our part, but it just started to happen. So it kind of organically grew from there. So I completely agree.
I'd love to switch to the topic of how we found you. 'Cause we read a wonderful excerpt, I believe it was of an article where you articulated something so beautiful in this notion and interdependency of systems and innovation and solutions being hardware, software, and heartware.
Can you bring that to life for the audience a little bit?
DR. LOUISA MAY KHOO
Sure. Being in the public service, a lot of the work that we do, a lot of the evidence that we collect is very much quantitatively sort of framed and for me, I felt in sort of, in the last decade of, of my work life, that wasn't enough.
Like that for me just gave me an ability to understand patterns. But I didn't understand the whys behind the patterns. The stories behind the data. And I felt I needed more, and which was why in my doctoral research I chose to use ethnography as a lens through which I wanted to make sense of the world.
Ethnography is really about trying your best to be part of the other person's world, right? So it's not just an interview where you are still the outsider, you're asking the questions and someone's giving you a response. Right? In ethnography you are trying to live that life, do the observations, be in that space.
So like how I was in Chinatown and trying to recreate for myself that lens of what those seniors were feeling.And this story that I heard from one of my, one of the people I met sort of, I think really honed in on the synthesis of hardware, software and heartware, and here it goes.
So there is this man living with his son and this man, he goes to the neighborhood shop every day. Without fail at noon to buy beer. And he uses it to drink it with his son every evening because for him it is a father and son bonding activity. So he waits for his son to come back from work and they do this beer drinking session in the evenings.
But as the father aged, he developed dementia and so he stopped drinking, but he still goes to the shop every day at noon to buy beer. So the son went to the shopkeeper and the son said, look, my father has this problem. Now when he comes and he buys the beer from you, we don't actually drink it anymore.
So is it possible that you let him come buy the beer? But then in a couple of days, I will bring the beer back for you and you, you, you refund me the money. The shopkeeper was very understanding and the shopkeeper said, yes, no problem. Right? And agreed. And one day the father did not appear at the shop at noon to buy beer. And so the shopkeeper calls the son. The son rushed home and discovered that the father had fallen in the bathroom. So what this showed was that in planning, sort of the housing and the activities, there was a neighborhood.And that the neighborhood had shops and that the shop was just a stone throw away from where the apartment was, where the man lived. And he was able to do this activity every day because the physical infrastructure was there, right? Like the neighborhood was set up with, with all the land users and all the retail needs.So that's the hardware. The software, of course, is the commercial transaction that happens, right? The activities that happen every day. And that was the business activity that the father shared with the shopkeeper, right? And every day. They developed a connection, right? Even though maybe as he aged, he no longer said very much to the shopkeeper, but it was familiarity.
It was that sense of bonding, right? That sense of just because of the routine of the everyday, and it was because of this routine too. So the software that when the son made that request that seemed out of the ordinary the shopkeeper agreed, that sort of set the foundation for when he felt something was amiss.
He actually picked up the phone to call the son. So that's the heartware. So the compassion that we feel, the care that we have, all of this, I think is, is innate in us. But if we didn't have the hardware, if it was not sealed by the software then the heartware doesn't have that space to flourish. And so I think when we think about an aging society, when we think about care scapes. This is what I try to bring through my work as well. That the hardware needs to be there, the software needs to happen so that the compassion and care that we feel for people can grow and can foster that care scape that I usually speak of. Whereas if you don't make the land users intertwined, then you never have the hardware plus the software for the heartware to happen.
ANIKA
Love that.
DR. LOUISA MAY KHOO
Does that make sense?
ANIKA
Oh, it really does. And I thank you so much for taking us through that story. What I love about it is this notion and idea that we are all built for heartware,, and I'm making the heart sign, at a very basic level, people want to be empathetic. They want to reach out, they want to do all these things: innovation, progression, daily life, all those other things get in the way of things.
And if you don't have the infrastructure to support it, there's a lot of distraction that happens. There's a lot of barriers that are put up.And it actually takes me back to your first comment around loneliness, we are connected, village people who want to feed off of each other and want to be in that community. But so much of progression has gotten in the way of us living in that way.
I think it's important for the people who are creating the solutions, the innovators in this space to keep those things in mind. I think oftentimes we will look at a technology solution in the absence of some of the other things. Or we'll look at, like you were saying, an urban planning decision that's made that makes sense from a hardware standpoint, but it won't for the other elements of it.
So it's such a wonderful trifecta of things that you've landed on so special.
DR. LOUISA MAY KHOO
Yeah, and I think it works in the reverse, right? So if we redevelop a landscape, for instance, right? We tear down everything and all these connections that we've built over time. So imagine the commercial transactions that happen every day between a shopkeeper and a consumer.
Whether it's at the market or at a bank. Those relationships are fractured when a space is redeveloped, right? And you put better users and probably your intensifying land, you can bring in more, more households, and there are many good reasons why redevelopment has to happen, but we forget that there's always that cost, right? Where the relationships are no longer there. You have to start again from scratch. And it is these relationships that actually make up that heartware, like you don't even need to actually say very much to someone, but because you know that this person appears at the bus stop at this point in time when I take the bus and when he's not there, I'm wondering, Hmm, did something happen to him?
I've not seen him for a week. Even though I don't know his name. These are the things that kind of build and foster the heartware. We wantingly just destroy everything without sufficient consideration of the sacrifice. I think we lose so much, right? So even as an urban planner now, I think I'm a little bit more purpose. I think in what I do, that it's not just about the gains, but I'm very mindful about, okay, now what is lost? Can it balance? Like, like does it equate right? I think we always need to make that judgment call cognizant of losses and cognizant of the ability for people to actually adapt, and the coping mechanisms that we actually put in place.So the onus is on us to help people cope with change.
ANIKA
Dr. Khoo our theme this season comes directly from being an audience to a documentary. So, very recently, a couple of months ago the Root & Seed team attended a documentary on early stage onset of dementia through the caregiver's eyes.And as the filmmaker was thanking everyone who participated in the film, everybody who touched it, she turned to the audience and she said, an audience completes a story, and that really resonated with us. And I wondered if you had a perspective on that.
As you've walked the streets of Chinatown, as you have embraced these philosophies of hardware, heartware, software in your urban planning role, and as you observed, the challenges of that are happening in the aging space today. What does that statement mean to you?
DR. LOUISA MAY KHOO
So much. Right? And I think listening too is not just about the verbal cues, it is also about the silencers. It is about body language. It is about the clasping of the hands. And just staring into space, for instance, and all of this sort of through the ethnography method taught me to listen with the heart, right?It's not just with your years of what you can hear, not hear, but also the vibe the sense, the passion, the anger the resentment that, that comes across without things being said. And I think that developing that awareness is crucial. And so in the policy making space, we often do engage, but engagement is often seen as something that is at the tail end of something.
Oh, we have done this policy. Let's engage with the public or the seniors and see what they think. But for me, engagement is very much an ongoing process. It is about listening, it is about being upfront with people and again, bringing authenticity into the heart, into the conversation.
And I have what I call anchor meetings where I will purposefully, every two to three weeks, I will have a community meeting, whether it's with seniors or it's with the unhoused or it's with those in supportive housing, for instance. They are my happy, happy places because that's where I feel most grounded. Most real. It is often raw, hard to take in confronting, given some of the spaces and precarity that people are going through, but for me it is what reminds me of my mission. What I need to continue to use as my fuel to keep on going. Because sometimes in the workspace we can be so driven by the fires and what needs to be done now that we forget the larger picture, um, the meaning behind what we do.
And I think for me, just rediscovering a new way of looking at things through the seniors lens, through, people living and experiencing precarity in homelessness. For me that is such a privilege and for me to be allowed into their world. They are the audience, right? They are the recipients of whatever we met out as government or as public offices.
But if we don't walk that journey with them from the start we can never do enough for them. And for me, I think that's how the audience completes the story.
ANIKA
It is just so easy for people who are studying the interactions and influences of people on infrastructure to do so from behind a desk with access to the world, literally at her fingertips through our tech and devices. But it's Dr. Khoo's way, her mission and philosophy of being in the environments with those who she is studying and making solutions for, that is where the greatest learning happens, and we appreciate and adore that so much.
We learned a tremendous amount, and not surprisingly, it's the lessons from the stories with Dr. Khoo that will stay with us forever.
So that's it, folks. Another season in the books. As we put the finishing touches on this season, it's hard to not reflect on the fact that we have covered so much ground with such an incredibly diverse set of guests. From those who surpassed the parent-child relationship into business partners with Helen and Jan Lo to Dr. Caron Leid who urged us to lean into the hard parts of caregiving to where we started this season with siblings, Mohan and Janani, who knew that telling their father's story would reveal so much more than the surface. It has been a true pleasure. To top it off, we stitched together a tapestry that respected the exchange, the between, the connection that happens between storyteller and the audience.
An ultimate praise for the listener, the audience member who without them a story would just never seem to be truly complete. So in fitting fashion, just like that documentarian who inspired us, we turn to you, our listeners, and thank you for completing this season's story by listening intently, sharing generously, and playing a part in our narrative.
After all, it's you who completes our Root and Seed story.
Root & Seed is hosted by me, Anika Chabra, executive produced by Jenn Siripong Mandel, and edited by Emily Groleau. Bye for now.
Episode Credits
Hosted by: Anika Chabra
Brought to you by: Root & Seed
Executive Producer: Jennifer Siripong Mandel
Editing by: Emily Groleau
Sound Editing by: Camille Blais
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