BIG BANG REDUX
by Calvin Low

Singapore's world-class public housing owes much to its desperate origins in the 1960s.

Western Asia-watchers are often fascinated, even bewildered, that development strategies which have failed ignominiously in the West have been applied with great success in emerging Asia. Über architect Rem Koolhaas is one of them.

"I personally find (it) very interesting (that) the modernist vernacular of the 1970s—buildings that once you put them in Singapore or Dubai take on totally different meanings," Koolhaas told architectural critic Nicolai Ouroussoff in a New York Times article in June, 2008. "Some of the modern typologies work in Asia even though they are totally dysfunctional in America. Typologies we've rejected turn out to be viable in other contexts."

Koolhaas might have been mulling such 1970s Singapore buildings like People's Park Complex and Golden Mile Complex, which he has visited and written about in his megatome manifesto "S, M, L, XL". But the same observation could also apply to Singapore's 48-year-old public housing programme carried out by its Housing and Development Board (HDB).

HDB's most recent international acclaim came in the form of a lifetime achievement award for excellence for its far-reaching vision and public service innovations, conferred upon it by the United Nations Public Administration Network in June, 2008. How far the HDB's programme has come since its early years, when it was regarded by Western planners with cautious curiosity at best and criticised for producing homogeneous urban hives hardly fit for human habitation at worst.

BIG BANG
HDB's success to date is derived from the continual fine-tuning of its public housing policies and practices to suit the changing needs and aspirations of Singaporeans and the government over the last five decades. But its DNA was written in the socio-economic and political upheavals of the late 1950s and 1960s when the Singapore nation itself was taking shape.

This formative period of strife and turbulence can be likened to a 'Big Bang' which was fuelled by colonial apathy to the desperate cry for shelter by a people on the cusp of nationhood. The political change it precipitated—from colonial to self-government in 1959—led to the HDB's conception in 1960. And it was under the hard-nosed leadership of the HDB pioneers during those first years that the definitive hallmarks of public housing which have made it so quintessentially Singaporean to this day, were moulded. The significance of this 'Big Bang' cannot be overstated. Had the HDB failed to deliver a mortal blow to the housing crisis that had been allowed to fester over 140 years of British colonial rule within the first three years of its operations, Singapore today would likely be a vastly different political and social landscape.

For the political future of Lee Kuan Yew and his People's Action Party (PAP), which formed Singapore's first locally-elected government in 1959 on the promise of putting a roof over the heads of the long-suffering population, depended upon HDB delivering the goods.

The HDB did, and the PAP has continually governed Singapore from that first moment of self-rule from the British. This symbiotic relationship between public housing and political mandate has remained a staple in every General Election hence, manifesting most recently in the form of HDB's estate upgrading programmes. Clearly, the origin of this symbiosis could be traced to the appalling neglect on the part of Singapore's colonial rulers to house the population. To understand how public housing, this cornerstone of the Singaporean identity, took shape, it is necessary to revisit the colonial era when its DNA was being written.

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Calvin Low is trained in architecture and journalism. He joined the Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA) in 1985 to help establish urban conservation in Singapore. In 1995, he pursued journalism, spending nine years at Singapore Press Holdings, eventually serving as News Editor for Streats, Singapore's first freesheet. As URA's Head (Urban Studies) between 2004 and 2006, he conceptualised, authored and edited such books and exhibitions as 20 under 45 and Shaping Singapore. An architectural columnist for The Straits Times (Urbanscrawl), his latest book is 2007's 10 Stories—Queenstown Through The Years.

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