This question became the central preoccupation of one particular scholar  – sociologist Riaz Hassan – who, during his time as a member of staff in the sociology department at NUS during the 1970s, undertook a number of studies on the social and psychological effects on Singaporeans of being housed in high-density highrises [1]. Hassan brought to this work not only the legacy of Durkheim’s original sociology of suicide, but training in North American urban ecology. In one of his earliest studies of suicide, Hassan looked at files from the Coroner’s Courts for a one-year period. He observed that suicide was associated with specific areas of residence in Singapore and concluded that HDB flats had the highest suicide rates of all residential types in Singapore.  Furthermore, the methods of committing suicide were strongly related to the types of residence of the victim, with leaping from a highrise being a common mode of suicide. For the purposes of this study Hassan developed a ‘worry index’ [image_1]. Using the ‘worry index’ Hassan found that people who live on the higher floors experience more stress and strain than those living on the lower floors. As Hassan found living environment to be a determining factor in one’s mental well-being, it is not surprising that he suggested that those diagnosed pathologies could be dealt with by adjusting attributes of that environment. The implication of this kind of scholarship was that Singaporeans (citizen and state alike) needed to pursue a new level of care in terms of managing the ‘limits’ of their newly acquired domestic spaces.

Hassan’s analysis no doubt reflected the actual shock (and worry) felt by many Singaporeans as they made the transition from kampong, slum and squatter settlement to highrise. But his scholarship was also a reflection of scepticisms emerging in relation to this form in the West, and specifically in the cross-disciplinary field of behavioural ecology which, under the press of evidence of highrise pathologies, was in the thrall of a form of environmental determinism. The relatively occasional, if spectacularly tragic, events of highrise leaping, and Riaz Hassan’s sociological accounts of them, produces a challenging ‘detour’ to the idea of the highrise as a perfect housing solution for a modernising nation.

It was in part to challenge the kind of scholarship represented by Riaz Hassan, and to clarify any ‘malicious misconceptions’ that might persist around ‘Singapore suicide’, that in 1980, Chia Boon Hock (supported by the Southeast Asian Medical Information Centre) conducted a comprehensive study of suicidal behaviour [2] . This study gave an alternate narrative to the presumed relationship between the nature of suicide in Singapore and the rise of highrise living. It could not deny that, in Singapore, by the time of the study, leaping from highrise buildings was the most common method of suicide, accounting for some 42% of suicides [3]. Indeed, the report even identifies the highrise leap as a method of suicide particular to Singapore, with Chia concluding that ‘nowhere in the world is this method so frequently used’. Chia, however, pointedly replaces the deterministic causality that Hassan posed with a far more casual relationship between mode of suicide and mode of dwelling.  In Chia’s view, the rise in the incidence of suicide by ‘the highrise leap’ is best explained by three facts: availability, accessibility and fashion. Chia notes, ‘[a]s the percentage of the population living in highrise flats increases, there is a parallel increase in the percentage of suicides by leaping’ [4].In this second stage of suicide scholarship the highrise form was now only modestly implicated by mere correlation in the distinctive character of Singaporean suicide.

These expert studies offered strategies for managing not only a specific Singaporean socio-psychic problem, but also the problem that that these negative symptoms (and most certainly that unrestrained of act of ‘the highrise leap’) caused for the national narrative of Singaporean housing success.  Through this scholarship ‘the highrise leap’ was rendered a small and incidental fact about modernization in Singapore. This later and ‘more accurate’ sociological accounting of highrise living ensured that the highrise form, rather than having its viability challenged, came to be more securely enmeshed in the Singaporean modernization project. In this example, social science becomes, ultimately, an ally of the highrise form. Indeed, the history of highrise housing provision in Singapore is heavily populated with social scientific accounts of highrise quality of life, and for many years the HDB sponsored much of this scholarship itself in the name of ‘improvement’ and ‘innovation’. As such, this scholarship, even when critical, often came to be incorporated in the systems that not only sustained, but ultimately enlarged, highrise housing, such that today Singapore leads the way internationally in what is now called ‘supertall living’.