Public Housing: The Working-class Barracks

Abstract

The provision of public housing for approximately 86 per cent of Singapore’s population by the construction of half a million apartments (GOS, 1989a, p. 158; Yeh, 1989, p. 826) is generally agreed to be the outstanding achievement of the PAP-state.

Indeed public housing in Singapore is the single most visible index of the government’s outstanding performance; it is the de facto monument to the PAP government’s success. (Tay, 1989, p. 860)

In Singapore, housing is a symbol of pride, of nationhood, of the political achievement of the People’s Action Party, and of government benevolence towards the public interest. (Pugh, 1989, p. 837)

But the political function of public housing as a mechanism of social control is not widely understood. Yet it is one of the main mechanisms by which the PAP-state has guaranteed labour power for its economic strategy and cemented its political supremacy. A periodisation of the public housing system’s development shows how it has worked as a regulatory mechanism and how different functions have predominated at different times according to the economic strategy and the nature of political conflict.