This project explores the play of difference and repetition in a global urban form, that being the modernist residential highrise. It investigates two cases that encapsulate the varied fortunes of the highrise: the UK, where the form is routinely condemned, even demolished; and Singapore, where it is embraced enthusiastically and continues to be built at greater heights and densities. The project elaborates an ethnographic and visual methodology, and a theory of relational materiality, to investigate the multi-scaled logics of such divergence and its implications for understanding social and urban space. The study contributes to current debates on in geographies of architecture and materiality, architectural technology, everyday urban life, transnationalism, and high-density living.

The residential highrise is one of the world’s most ubiquitous building forms. Its global spread, uniformity and apparent indifference to local conditions means it is routinely seen as an emblem of globalisation. Conceived within avant-garde continental modernism, then mainstreamed into state building programmes across the globe, it was repeated with a unique rigor in the history of human habitation. Underpinned by standardised production, guided by the concept of an aerated city, and packaged within a functionalist ‘machine aesthetic’, the highrise offered high-density dwelling within parkland settings – ‘healthy’, ‘rational’, ‘efficient’.

Yet the state-sponsored highrise has had quite distinct fortunes in different settings. For example, in the ‘East’ (Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, China) the form thrives, yet in the ‘West’ (Europe, North America) it is shrouded by controversy. The state-sponsored highrise housing of Britain and Singapore, which form the empirical focus of this study, encapsulates this divergence. In Britain, from as early as the 1960s, doubts emerged about the highrise and it was soon reviled, resulting in its on-going demolition. This stigma remains today even as housing authorities maintain some highrises, and certain ‘landmark’ blocks are heritage listed, even gentrified. Yet, as enthusiasm for the highrise waned in Britain, a newly independent Singapore embraced a highrise housing programme that now accommodates 85% of its population. Constrained by land shortages, the enthusiasm for highrise in Singapore is undiminished. The government recently embarked on super-highrise developments with unprecedented densities and heights. Put generally, a form the West wishes had reached its use-by date is flourishing in the East. Neither the condemnation of the form in the West, nor the enthusiasm for it in the East, is without reason: highrise ‘failures’ and ‘successes’ can be accounted for by social, political, environmental and technical facts. But often such accounts are overly polarized such that they produce obstacles to critical scholarship of the highrise.

Existing accounts of the highrise are unusually polarized along the following lines:

• Success/Failure: Highrise failure in Britain and highrise success in Singapore are routinely accounted for by macro-scale analyses of collective consumption processes that privilege national policy frames. In both settings, transnational flows are given limited attention.

• East/West: Accounts of highrise success in the ‘East’ are often Eurocentric. In Tower Block Glendinning and Muthesius [1] imply highrises are received ‘unquestioningly’ in Asia. Rem Koolhaas [2] describes ‘Anglo-Saxon slabs … forcing’ Singaporeans into ‘another civilisation’: a familiar diffusionist account. In Shek kip mei Syndrome, Castells et al. [3] account for the success of Singapore’s highrise more generously, arguing it is the result of a unique marriage between market economy and collective consumption. Koolhaas, too, admits local factors be they Singapore’s ‘greater authoritarianism’ or ‘the Asian mentality’.

• Macro/micro: Macro-scale analyses have been subsidized by studies concerned with human agency and everyday life in the highrise. In Political Legitimacy and Housing Chua [4] examines how Singapore residents alter their flats, and Miller [5] shows how renovating kitchens allows British tenants to transform ‘alienating’ housing into ‘inalienable culture’.

• Material/immaterial: Existing studies of the highrise in both Britain and Singapore deal awkwardly with the materiality of the highrise form. On the one hand, there are traditions of scholarship (grounded in urban ecology, environmental psychology and post-occupancy evaluation) that give the form a fully determining (negative) power in relation to social life. On the other, accounts -- like Castells et al.’s of Singapore -- let the highrise form disappear within the more abstracted materialism of political economy.

• Linear/non-linear: Tower Block [6] and Housing A Nation [7] provide accounts of the British and Singaporean highrise respectively, and do so in a way that is suggestively attentive to the interplay between policy and technology. However, both are framed by localised and linear developmentalist narratives, and foreclose on the explanatory possibilities of non-linear approaches.

This study focuses instead on what Deleuze calls ‘the play of difference and repetition’: the ways ‘little differences’ are extracted from ‘mechanical and stereotypical repetitions’, and how ‘secret’ and ‘disguised’ repetitions inhabit performances of difference. Understanding this play of difference and repetition as it relates to the residential highrise is our central theoretical problem.