Disaster, Housing, and other Singapore Stories

Rather than just a narrative of disaster and rehabilitation, Squatters into citizens is a tapestry of stories. The recounting of the 1961 fire serves as the unifying thread that holds a wide array of plots and tales: the fire victims’ memories, rumours of arson, conspiracy theories, and the conventional framing of Singapore’s development from colony to nation-state, known as ‘the Singapore story.’ Even the author’s life story is an integral part of the book. Loh, an assistant professor in Sogang University, spent his childhood in one of Singapore’s emergency housing projects. He acknowledges that this fact makes him the right candidate for this research project, but his reflexivity also reveals that even fellow academics believed that the author worked on a wrong topic because it was supposedly an inconsequential event. He nonetheless disproves this notion in the ten chapters of this book.

From Kampong to High-Rise Estate

Unlike ‘the Singapore story,’ which presents a process of progress from unsanitary kampongs to high-rise estates, the book does not move in a linear fashion. Loh looks at the various roots, from which one can trace the social significance of the 1961 fire. Chapter one provides an overview and theoretical understanding of these roots: the history of urbanisation and migration; the emergence of a kampong economy and culture; the encounters between the state and kampong residents; and the “culture of fire” that developed through the years.

The next four chapters elaborate on each of these aspects. Chapter two describes the urban landscape of the 1950s, characterized by the increase of bigger households moving into the kampongs and the housing shortage that met these migrants, such as those in Bukit Ho Swee. Far from static and traditional, the kampong residents’ outlook was pragmatic and favoured mobility. Bukit Ho Swee’s semi-autonomous economy and the unique culture it engendered are the topics of chapter three. The residents engaged in informal (from hawking food to driving pirate taxis) and semi-rural (such as rearing pigs and cultivating vegetables) economic activities to augment incomes that they derived as casual labourers in the formal sector. Such a depiction interrogates the caricatured image of Bukit Ho Swee as a ‘black area’ encumbered by insanitary conditions and secret societies. Chapter four highlights the position of Bukit Ho Swee’s residents within the wave of anticolonialism vis-à-vis the “representation and surveillance” (74) of the postwar state. By their engagement with organised groups, and as left-wing politics merged with the anticolonial struggle, kampong dwellers thwarted plans of demolition, forcing the state to shift its policy toward alternative housing for low-income households. Chapter five shows how the threat of clearance by the authorities was matched by the omnipresent risk of conflagration, which cultivated both a culture of fire in the kampongs and an ambivalent state-society relationship. While the state regarded kampong residents as passive toward the threat of fire, the latter’s experience of large fires in the 1950s and the development of emergency public housing made them suspicious toward the government.

After presenting these sociopolitical dimensions of early postwar Singapore, Loh proceeded to narrating the ostensible central event of the book: the 1961 inferno. Chapter six tells the story of that disaster, which was a confluence of human errors and socially constructed hazards: residents were caught off-guard; the Singapore Fire Brigade received a late call and lacked manpower for firefighting and crowd control; fire engines could not pass through the crowded, narrow streets; and incidents of looting even happened. When the smoke cleared four fatalities were recorded, thousands were rendered homeless, and yet the cause of the fire remained hazy. The immediate post-disaster state response, in the form of mobilizing relief efforts and controlling the site to prevent victims from rebuilding their houses, is discussed in chapter seven. Compared with its colonial predecessor, PAP was more successful in its post-disaster social programmes, which was predicated on its decision to acquire the fire site to build low-cost flats. Such was the context behind Lee Kuan Yew’s promise of rehousing all victims within nine months (169). The process of fulfilling that pledge is the focus of the succeeding chapter. Leading the way toward that goal was the Housing and Development Board (HDB), which embarked on a building programme that aimed not only rehabilitation but also the concretization of PAP’s envisioned state and industrialisation programme, especially in terms of cultivating a pliable populace to serve as a source of labour for the formal economy. Chapter nine describes the social conditions in the housing estate that arose out of the ashes of the 1961 fire. Though Loh observes transformations, he also notes the persistence of kampong culture among estate residents, many of whom remained in the low-income brackets and lived in one-room flats. Unfortunately, completing the project in time—which lasted more than nine months— rather than providing social amenities was the authorities’ emphasis. In the end, the official discourse maintained that the estate remained a “black area” despite its modern façade.

Narratives and counter narratives

The title of the book presents a seemingly contrived topic, but the breadth of the research and depth of the analyses are impressive. The variety of the historical sources Loh uses does not only reflect scholarly rigour but also form the argument: while traditional historiography prefers documentary evidence that provides an ‘aerial view’ of the subject (e.g., master plans, maps, aerial photos), he recognises that such sources present only one perspective. To know what happened in the kampongs, along the estate corridors, and inside the flats—to present alternative Singapore stories—he turns to oral history by conducting 114 interviews and using 33 recorded interviews from the National Archives of Singapore. He is nonetheless critical in assessing these oral narratives; he acknowledges that personal memories are also susceptible to shifts and slippages due to the influence of the “official mythology” (249). As chapter ten relates, oral histories are indeed a universe of counter narratives, from persistent conspiracy theories that regard government as the mastermind of the 1961 fire to the nonlinearity of the victims’ nostalgia toward the ‘old kampong days.’ But in a society where “living in the sky” (217) has become an aspiration even among the victims themselves, such counter narratives are nonthreatening to the state.

Loh’s constant reminder is that the 1961 fire was not the whole story. PAP’s hardline stance versus the kampongs was not just a crusade against unauthorised housing, but also formed a bigger agenda toward ‘high modernist’ industrialisation. With the largely successful project of turning “‘Chinese squatters’ into model Singaporean citizens” (211), Bukit Ho Swee, a kampong-turned-estate, indeed represented “a massive political victory” (209) not just for the PAP government, but also for the official Singapore story. [1,193 words]

Michael D. Pante, Department of History, Ateneo de Manila University (mpante@ateneo.edu)