Everyday negotiations: women's spaces and the public housing landscape in Singapore

Abstract

Focusing on the everyday lives of ordinary women in Singapore, this paper attempts to demonstrate the nexus between space and society in the local context. It is primarily concerned with the interaction between Singapore's public housing landscape and gender identities through women's daily routines. Toward this end, it first explores how Singapore's public housing landscape reflects and legitimises existing gender roles and relations. Through a critical interpretation of public housing allocation policies, this paper argues that the state's assumptions of ‘appropriate’ gender roles and relations that are far from equal are powerfully engraved on, and legitimised in, the public housing landscape. The paper also examines how women as active agents negotiate understandings and meanings of gender identities through their everyday activities. It reveals that while gender inequalities are reflected in, and reinforced by, women's everyday lives, which revolve predominantly around the timing and spacing of the activities of home‐centred and community‐centred settings, it is also through their everyday lives that women undertake various strategies to negotiate these inequalities. Overall, the paper demonstrates that although women are fully capable of making a difference in their everyday lives temporally and spatially, they remain constrained by an overarching social system which renders uncollected and scattered resistances in everyday life incapable of upsetting existing unequal gender roles and relations.