A-Legal Boundary-Crossings in Singapore’s Public Housing Blocks

Abstract Socio-legal studies on legal boundary-crossing provide accounts of how states and individuals negotiate the spatial relation between them in terms of legality/illegality. However, situations which present as both legal and illegal can unfold in ways which escape analytic capture by this polarity, posing a challenge to these approaches. In this paper, I examine examples of personal use of the common corridor by public flat owners in Singapore to test the explanatory power of Hans Lindahl’s concept of a-legality in deepening our understanding of boundary-crossings which take place in Singapore’s public housing blocks. I argue that in these situations, a-legality exposes a social and cultural latitude present in the lived experience of the relation between the social concept of ownership and the legal concept of property which would not be visible through an (il)legality analysis.