When it comes to bad social behaviour at food centres and public spaces, we can see the "solutions" but we seem stuck at changing the situations.

People have to become more civic-minded when using public facilities. There are calls to impose more severe penalties, educate, cultivate more civic consciousness and so on, but to little or no avail.

We tend to forget that people who behave badly when using public facilities may be very careful with their own facilities at home.

Why the double standard?

The difference is ownership. If we want a better behaved public, we must enhance people's ownership of public facilities.

When government policies emphasise top-down decisions, restricting the use of public facilities that require obtaining special permissions, limiting meaningful access and meting out punitive fines for perceived or real misuse, people are going to feel a very narrow sense of individual ownership of public facilities.

We can plead, cajole, impose fines and jail time, which we have tried for a very long time, but with very little enduring improvement.

Government policies have to change to let people have a sense of ownership when using public facilities, by letting them have more direct say in how the facilities are governed.

Let people decide what they wish to do with a vacant plot at the bottom of their housing block, be it the void deck or a small field, with broad guidelines on responsible ownership, not restrictive red tape. Then change might happen.

Thomas Lee Hock Seng (Dr)