First decade revisited: architect-planners, public housing and the decolonization of Singapore

The public housing programme of the hegemonic government Housing and Development Board (HDB) has long occupied a central place within the ‘Singapore Story’ – the official foundation-narrative propagated by the Singaporean nation-state under the unbroken rule of the People’s Action Party (PAP) since 1959. In recent years, however, this narrative has increasingly been questioned by a range of scholars, writing from various perspectives. This article complements and supplements those authors’ revisionist accounts with the granular primary evidence contained in a little-known trove of archival housing files relating to the early years of PAP government. It focuses on the role of architects and planners within the dirigiste PAP-HDB system, highlighting that system’s opportunistic avoidance of demarcation-boundaries between built-environment professionals, mainstream civil servants and politicians. The article’s three-part structure reflects the turbulent fluctuations of the inaugural period of PAP rule. The first section, ‘Deconstruction’, briefly traces the role of housing and planning within the final breakdown of the colonial order in the mid/late 1950s. The two following sections, ‘Stabilization’ and ‘Reconstruction’, show how the HDB, and its architect-planners in particular, first re-embedded and then radically recast the housing system, and architectural ‘modernism’, in the service of the postcolonial regime that succeeded it.