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What emerges from the previous two chapters is that Singapore seems to be a postcolonial city-state in which both the contradictions and the complexities of becoming a modern nation-state are seemingly resolved by state-directed technocratic and technicist means. This modern-Asian city is a partial fulfilment of a modernising desire to wipe the slate clean, and to invent society from scratch. The purpose of this chapter is twofold. First, I will continue exploring the People’s Action Party (PAP) state’s homogenising socio-cultural engineering by looking at the bland postcolonial urbanism that is contemporary Singapore’s built environment. As I have suggested in the Introduction, this urbanism is a part of a radical modernisation that seems part of a now-lost world of liberal confidence, achieved in an illiberal political environment open to a highly internationalised economy shaped and reshaped by the major Western powers, especially the USA. As with previous chapters, there is a need here to understand what it means when the West becomes part of a self-administered and thus not simply a neocolonialist process of Asian modernisation, one in which cultural negotiation has effectively taken place. Second, I want to argue that the PAP’s statist modernisation is not one necessarily fully embraced by the city-state’s population, even while the iconic and ubiquitous modernist public-housing estates that best epitomise the city-state’s built environment houses over 80 percent of the population. Public housing — a genuinely successful housing programme in many ways, well-maintained and generally clean — is a major part of the happy face of the state’s achieved modernity. In contrast, as has often been noted, the 4 The Homogenised Urban Environment and Locality Deterritorialisation 78 ‘[e]xperience with high rise, high density public housing in the Western world has been essentially negative’.1 The other two noticeable PAP development projects are industrial estates and urban renewal in the downtown core. The Housing and Development Board (HDB) was started as the successor to the colonial Singapore Improvement Trust in 1960, and the 1960–65 development budget included S$194 million for public housing (US$1 = S$3 at that point of time). Since then, there has been no turning back, and the immediate postindependence housing shortage was effectively ended by the end of the 1960s. The problem of housing had been studied by one of the founder-members of the PAP itself, Dr. Goh Keng Swee, in the 1950s.2 By 1968, nearly 750,000 people lived in government-built high-rise flats in a total area of just 2.2 square miles.3 Public housing and the island’s financial and shopping areas are the major aesthetic expression of the state’s desired modernity, an aesthetic powered by social and economic instrumentalism and ‘usefulness’. Most Singaporeans in general have no choice but to deal with the homogenised urban environment of the PAP’s Asian modern. This chapter will look at some of the unease with the city-state and its public image, despite the delivery of economic success, as expressed in recent independent film. Such film forms part of the artistic-cultural production that have arisen since the 1980s, partly in reaction to the particular PAP-created urban and socio-cultural environment, and represents recent attempts to think through and indeed relocalise at a non-statist level what it means to live within the projected happy-clappy if deterritorialised modernist locales of Singapore. Independent films started to appear in the 1990s and they have demanded, indirectly, both a ‘Westernisation’ and ‘Asianisation’ in order to gain what might be described as ‘other experiences of the present’ apart from the existing, narrow national economism. Not unnaturally, given its prominence, public housing and its denizens are often the subjects of such attempts to relocalise the built environment. The ‘local’ that comes about, of course, is not a simple, bounded notion of specifically rooted culture and identities. Singapore, to begin with, is a society created with a large number of economic migrants, and the recreation and reassertion of the local after modernisation can hardly be the simple re-assertion of what the state already, to a significant extent, has erased. The globalised ‘condition’, as is increasingly acknowledged, is a multi-layered one. Creating the Modern Asian City In Singapore — modernization in its pure form — the forces of modernity are enlisted against the demands of modernism. … [It] has adopted only the mechanistic, rationalistic program and developed it to an unprecedented perfection...

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