Beyond the spectacle of property windfalls in Singapore: Lefebvrian spaces of home against profit‐making

Abstract

In Singapore, owners of private housing estates reaping windfalls through collective sales have been subject to the news media's sensational coverage of the topic. While collective sales will give rise to new developments that regenerate the country's landscape to reflect the image and identity of an entrepreneurial city, efforts to resist this wealth generating urbanism are subject to erasure. Instances of minority owners disinterested in profit‐making using the courts to save their homes from the collective sale juggernaut are certainly emblematic of the inherent tension between one's home as housing and home as investment repository. Drawing upon ethnographical experiences from a housing estate built for public officials in Singapore, this article's use of the Lefebvrian theory of spatial production sheds light on how minority owners unmotivated by monetary windfalls (re)produce spaces of their homes that are overtly inimical to the impulses of majority owners to monetize their homes at high premiums.