Dangerous Migrants and the Informal Mobile City of Postwar Singapore

Abstract

This paper examines the struggle between the state and urban kampong population over the form and content of the ‘mobile city’ in postwar Singapore. As large numbers of low‐income Chinese moved into an expanding belt of informal settlements on the urban periphery, there emerged a semi‐autonomous way of life, characterised by underemployment and co‐existence with free‐ranging pigs and poultry, which were deeply abhorrent to both the British colonial and People’s Action Party (PAP) governments. Both authorities discursively represented the kampongs as ‘insanitary, congested and dangerous’ in order to render the urban margin legible through clearance and resettlement. The state of emergency occasioned by the outbreak of massive fires, the suppression of leftwing rural organisations and the robust acquisition of land for public development enabled the state to relocate the dwellers to public housing estates built over the urban kampongs in the 1960s. The transformation of ‘squatters’ into model ‘citizens’ gave rise to a new high modernist mobile city, where mobility and housing were dictated on the terms of the state.

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