Block 22 Bukit Ho Swee is part of the early phase highrise development in Singapore. From its beginnings in 1960, Singapore’s Housing Development Board (hereafter HDB), has been the main provider of housing for Singaporeans, nowadays accommodating well over 85% of the population in ‘owned’ (long-term leasehold) flats. Constrained by land shortages, committed to the pragmatics of efficient delivery, and no doubt influenced by global trends in mass housing provision, it enthusiastically adopted the modernist highrise as the architectural type for its post-independence programme of universal housing provision.

The HDB began its task of ‘housing a nation’ as a fledgling post-independence bureaucracy, having assumed the responsibility of housing provision from the colonial Singapore Improvement Trust. The post-independence Singaporean state invested heavily in highrise modernist housing but did so for reasons that went far beyond a social welfare commitment to provide ‘decent shelter’ [6]. Housing provision was a key mechanism in the making of modern Singapore: politically, culturally and economically. Chua [7] has observed that the commitment to universal provision meant that housing came to operate as a ‘covenant’ between people and government, with ‘continually upgraded’ housing offered in exchange for political support for the People’s Action Party (PAP).  PAP, he argues, secured its long-term political legitimacy by way of its commitment to ‘universal’ housing provision, giving Singapore a unique political stability if debated model of democracy. Housing also provided a tool for the cultural integration of the nation. By applying specific formulas of multi-ethic mixing in blocks and estates, the HDB provided a crucial mechanism for engineering a well-integrated, multi-ethnic Singapore. And, perhaps most significantly, housing provision was an intrinsic part of the emergent ‘developmental state’: lowering costs of living, developing urban infrastructure, directing capital formation (through compulsory savings), and providing employment opportunities [8].

The prioritising of development was a hallmark of post-independence Singapore and combined local agendas with more worldly aspirations linked to the international economy. A pragmatic reasoning often justified activities undertaken in the name of development, and a specific imperative was given to development itself by the uncertainty surrounding post-independence Singapore’s chances of ‘survival’ as a viable social, economic and political entity [9]. During this period the state cultivated ‘a continual sense of crisis and urgency’ in relation to which it could justify exercising exceptional powers, not least of which was the decommodification of land in Singapore which allowed compulsory acquisition for the purpose of any development deemed to be in the national interest [10]. Clancy (2004), for example, has noted that Singapore’s post-independence housing programme was justified explicitly by the diagnosis of a ‘housing emergency’ [11]. Landmark events, such as the 1961 fire in the ‘squatter village’ of Bukit Ho Swee, which left hundreds homeless, were used by the state to underline both the ‘necessity’ of housing modernisation, as well as the its ability to tackle the problem quickly and efficiently [12]. But Singapore’s housing ‘emergency’ was more profoundly embedded in official adjudications that existing housing (be that kampung, shop house or squatter settlement) was inappropriate: because not modern, falling short of standards of sanitation, exhibiting overcrowding, forcing ‘inappropriate’ activities onto the street, or harbouring subversive or illegal activities (including communist activities). As such, re-housing was foundationally conceived of by the state as a developmental journey: from ‘back then’ to ‘right now’, from ‘uncivilised’ to ‘civilised’, from ‘pre-modern’ to ‘modern’.

The HDB’s wholehearted embracing of highrise modernism as the architectural style for its housing programme was also justified pragmatically rather than aesthetically or ideologically. As Lui Thai Ker, then Executive Officer reflected in the 25th Anniversary volume Housing a Nation, the commitment to the highrise was ‘not intended to show off economic and technological capabilities’, there was ‘simply no other choice’. Despite the HDB already being aware of what they termed the ‘inherent disadvantages’ [13] and ‘handicaps’, and admitting the ‘belief’ held by ‘some sociologists’ that highrises contribute to a ‘sense of isolation’, practical reasoning nonetheless led inexorably upward:

The HDB has taken from the start a realistic and pragmatic stand by deciding that, in order to house every citizen decently, the residential density must be high. In order to sustain a high standard of living conditions, the dwelling units must be as large as the applicants can afford. To meet the criteria of high-density and large flats, the buildings have to be high-rise’ [14].

In Housing a Nation [15] the official narrative makes clear the fine-grained effort the HDB put into over-coming problems that were already evident in the highrises of Europe and North America. This effort manifested in rules and regulations about how residents should live in their homes and communities, systems of housing allocation, as well as a range of educational programmes that cultivated specific types of behaviour and values. It is perhaps unsurprising that scholarly and populist commentators routinely describe Singapore as ‘authoritarian’ in style. Certainly, Castells, Goh and Kwok [16] see the collective consumption of housing as a key mechanism of ‘social control in the management of the economy and of the society’. But perhaps it is Wee’s characterisation of Singapore’s mode of rule as ‘disciplinary modernisation’ that best approximates what was operating during the immediate post-independence years. For, as Wee observes, during this time the state sought not to be unilaterally authoritarian, but to ‘re-tool the subjectivities of its citizenry in the name of a modernist…utopianism’ [17].