Squatters into Citizens: The 1961 Bukit Ho Swee Fire and the Making of Modern Singapore

Chapter 8: Nine Months

182 Squatters into Citizens 182 8 Nine Months Upon the site of the former kampong, there was feverish building activity very soon after the unprecedented fire. Bukit Ho Swee Estate was the first big housing project in the People’s Action Party government ’s campaign to transform the semi-autonomous “black areas” of Singapore. Lee Kuan Yew’s promise to build flats for the fire victims within nine months had connotations of the birth of a new nation, but its value as a calculated act of political symbolism depended on his delivering on the pledge. The Bukit Ho Swee scheme was underpinned by the modernist principles that have since characterised the PAP’s social policy: scientific-rational organisation and determined implementation. Once completed, the project gave the HDB a strategic foothold for redeveloping the urban spaces south and west of the Singapore River. It signalled a turning point in the history of post-war Singapore, whereby the government could now dictate the terms on which a previously mobile people obtained their housing. War on Familiar Ogres and Unauthorised Housing The Bukit Ho Swee disaster occurred in a very different context from those of previous kampong fires. Singapore had been granted internal self-government by the British, and the PAP had been elected into office by a strong mandate. Between British and PAP ideas on housing there was much similarity, but the PAP had greater resolve and popular support to achieve its goals. This is clear from the way the PAP had attempted to expand the colonial housing programme in the two years prior to the fire. For the PAP, as for the colonial administration, where and how Singapore citizens lived were questions bound up with the character Nine Months 183 of the imagined state. Although originally a left-centre, anti-colonial party upholding the interests of low-income Chinese, the PAP had well-defined ideas on integrating the citizenry into the structure of the state. As Lim Kim San later recalled, the change in emphasis from anti-colonialism to nation building after the PAP came to power meant a different sort of social mobilisation: “[n]o more destroying, fighting” but “construction, development and building”.1 In the campaign for the 1959 general elections, the PAP declared it would take a leading role in providing low-cost housing for the people and replace the Singapore Improvement Trust with a housing authority under the government’s direct control.2 At a mass rally in February, Ong Eng Guan assured the Tiong Bahru fire victims that the party would consider their wish to live in wooden housing, but he emphasised that his party’s housing programme was based on the rationalist concepts of planned neighbourhoods, satellite towns, organised kampongs and the 1958 Master Plan.3 In February 1960, the PAP brought into force the Housing and Development Board, a statutory housing authority under the Ministry of National Development with full legal powers to build. The Board’s creation was a culmination of late-colonial efforts to expand public housing development in Singapore; the Lim Yew Hock government had endorsed the Housing and Development Board Bill in January 1959, answering the call for a proper housing authority made by the 1947 Housing Committee. Echoing the language of the Beveridge Report in Britain, the HDB would help achieve the PAP government’s declared aim to develop Singapore by eradicating the “ogres and giants in a subservient society — poverty, disease, ignorance, squalor, and idleness or unemployment”.4 The newly formed Ministry of Culture aimed to forge a national culture shared by the different communities, while the People’s Association similarly sought “to instil in the youth of Singapore a sense of national identity and a spirit of dedicated service to the community”.5 These measures 1 OHC, interview with Lim Kim San, 13 Feb. 1985. 2 PAP, Petir, May 1959, pp. 1, 3, 11. 3 PAP, The Tasks Ahead: The PAP’s Five-Year Plan, 1959–1964, Part 2 (Singapore: People’s Action Party, 1959), pp. 28–31. 4 MC, Democratic Socialism in Action, June 1959–April 1963 (Singapore: Publicity Division, Ministry of Culture, 1963), unpaginated. 5 Singapore, Annual Report 1960, p. 7. 184 Squatters into Citizens aimed to remove the political distance between dwellers of “black areas” and the establishment. The accelerated housing programme had the further benefit of boosting the PAP’s industrialisation programme and providing regular jobs for the rapidly growing...