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

Chapter 1: Fire: A Catalyst for Modern Singapore

A Catalyst for Modern Singapore    Fire: A Catalyst for Modern Singapore The story of how the 6,000 victims of the 96 Bukit Ho Swee fire were rehoused in modern housing has become a formative episode in the state-sanctioned historical narrative of Singapore, commonly known as the “Singapore Story”. According to Singapore’s Housing and Development Board, Bukit Ho Swee had been “an insanitary, congested and dangerous squatter area”, but The fire disaster was a blessing in disguise for all the occupants there. It is a far too familiar picture of an inert community who would not think of moving from their unpleasant and dangerous surroundings until a disaster makes the decision for them. In the Singapore Story, the fire is depicted as a “blessing in disguise” whereby an enlightened government rehoused the “inert community” of squatters after a disaster and set the country on the right path to progress and modernity.2 This book suggests a more complex and nuanced story. The inferno tipped the balance in a protracted struggle not between modernity and backwardness, but between two forms of modernity. On the one hand, the People’s Action Party (PAP) government, like the British colonial regime before it, envisaged the  HDB, Bukit Ho Swee Estate (Singapore: Housing and Development Board, 967), p. 39. 2 Lysa Hong and Huang Jianli, The Scripting of a National History: Singapore and Its Pasts (Singapore: NUS Press, 2008). 2 Squatters into Citizens creation of a well-planned city of public housing estates. On the other, both administrations confronted the proliferation on the urban fringe of kampongs, built haphazardly and without planning controls. These kampongs constituted an alternative form of modernity to the official vision. Squatters were not inert, as depicted, but progressive and urbanised, and with effective social autonomy. The rehousing after the Bukit Ho Swee fire integrated these semi-autonomous squatters into the formal structures of the state, an early project of social engineering that helped accelerate the development of postcolonial Singapore. No urban kampongs remained in Singapore, unlike other cities of Southeast Asia. A unique feature of Singapore’s historical experience was the complete replacement of the kampongs by public housing estates, and the contribution of this rehousing programme to urban development. This different history owed much to Singapore’s situation as a city-state with no hinterland. In Southeast Asian countries with substantial hinterlands, such as Indonesia, the Philippines or Thailand, a continuing influx of rural migrants made kampong clearance much more difficult. There, independence did not lead to any sustained trend towards public housing, not even in the cities of formerly British-ruled Malaysia. In Singapore, kampong clearance was facilitated by the political framing of a social emergency that was manifest in three ways: as a discourse, as a rehousing programme and as responses to fires. As a discourse, the idea of a “housing crisis” became an article of faith for Singapore’s post-war planners and politicians. The lack of proper housing for the low-income population, they perceived, was worsened by the existence of “insanitary, congested and dangerous” squatter areas such as Bukit Ho Swee. This discourse was also used to justify squatter clearance and public housing programmes in other cities in Southeast Asia, but it had much less effect there. Its original advocates were Anglo-American planners, for whom planning was the key to creating new societies on a worldwide scale. The second aspect of the social crisis was the role of emergency public housing in the 950s, when the balance between kampong and state housing began to tip in favour of the latter. Emergency accommodation was semi-permanent housing that could be built quickly and inexpensively but whose role in rehousing people during the first decade of the PAP government has almost been forgotten A Catalyst for Modern Singapore 3 in the academic literature. The Singapore Improvement Trust, the colonial agency entrusted with building housing after World War II, used emergency housing experimentally and with much reluctance to rehouse victims of kampong fires. However, high-rise emergency flats formed the bulwark of the HDB’s First Five-Year Plan for rehousing urban squatters. It was the emergency flat that transformed Bukit Ho Swee into a modern estate, and Singapore into a planned city, after the 96 fire. This accomplishment was exceptional in Southeast Asia, where public housing programmes were piecemeal, poorly planned and underfunded and frequently failed to dislodge urban kampongs. Finally...