Ideologies of `Upgrading' in Singapore Public Housing: Post-modern Style, Globalisation and Class Construction in the Built Environment

Abstract

Studies of Singapore public housing have tended to emphasise the ways in which urban planning and housing policies have contributed to rapid infrastructural development in the 1970s and 1980s while maintaining racial harmony and providing affordable housing to the majority of the population. In the 1990s, a series of `upgrading' exercises in many Singapore Housing and Development Board (HDB) estates have signalled a change in the status and function of public housing within Singapore's project to position itself as a global city. These transformations in the built environment are part of a larger process of social transformation not merely in terms of housing policy, but also in terms of issues of governance, class and social mobility, community and value systems. The centrality of public housing in Singapore's built environment, together with the sensitivity of its relationship to social indicators of upward mobility, make it a key indicator of the issues facing Singapore as it attempts to position itself as a global city. In particular, the move from a 'modern' to 'post-modern' architectural style signals the government's attempt at the same time to mark Singapore's arrival as a global city, to anticipate and manage social and economic divides and to construct a possible space for increasing public input and expression.