..."communist united front activities" (Straits Times 1 November 1963). These measures effectively shattered the leftwing movement and paved the way for the government's nation-building project. Among the organizations removed were the little-studied Singapore Rural Residents' Association and the Singapore Country People's Association, which were charged with "agitation on behalf of the Communists" and operating "recruiting and training centres for Communist cadres in the rural areas" (Straits Times 4 October 1963). (2) Their dissolution left kampong dwellers increasingly unable to resist their rehousing to public housing by the Housing and Development Board (HDB) (Gamer 1972, pp. 66-82). In November 1956, two precursor associations, the Singapore Wooden House Dwellers' Association and the Singapore Farmers' Association, had been banned in a similar crackdown on the left by the Labour Front government of Chief Minister Lim Yew Hock. Why these associations were able to organize kampong dwellers, and why the state had deemed it politically necessary to proscribe them are questions this paper will address towards revising the framework of analysis for the historiography of Singapore after World War Two.

This paper also broadly examines the social and spatial dynamics of power relations between state and society in post-war Singapore. The period is typically framed around an idealist struggle involving the political elites, primarily the British colonial regime and the post-colonial PAP (Yeo 1973; Turnbull 1989; Yeo and Lau 1991; Lau 1998), and more recently, the socialist left (Wee 1999; Harper 2001; Liew 2004). As Michel Foucault explained, forms of social discipline which define the uses of space could encompass the general population (Foucault 1986, p. 148). This paper will consequently review not the usual works on Singapore's political history but key texts on social history, sociology, and historical and urban geography.

The focus here is on the urban kampongs of post-war Singapore but they are examined against an evolving continuum of state-society contestations spanning the pre-war, post-war and independence eras. The ideological distance between the British colonial regime and the PAP is not as great as portrayed in most scholarship; while the PAP was far more successful than the colonial regime in implementing its policies, both shared what James Scott termed a "high modernist" philosophy and a "self-confidence about scientific and technical progress" (Scott 1998, p. 4). State efforts at establishing social control in the colonial and independence periods are examined first, and this is followed by a discussion about how these attempts were often contested. In the final section, the paper charts the social and economic developments that transformed the urban kampong into a central site of the state-society conflict in the post-war years. It maintains that the overt forms of contestation employed by urban kampong dwellers were exceptional in Singapore's history.

Urban kampongs were settlements of cheap, densely-built wooden housing with attap or zinc roofs and constructed usually without planning approval. These houses were either owned by a single family or subdivided into smaller cubicles for a number of tenant families. The urban kampongs were mostly but not exclusively inhabited by the labouring class and proliferated at the periphery of the Central Area (the area around the Singapore River) after the war. In 1961, 200,000-250,000 people out of a population of 1.7 million lived in urban kampongs stretching from Pasir Panjang to the west, Siglap to the east and Toa Payoh to the north (HDB 1961, p. 4; Teo and Savage 1985, p. 58). In most of the literature on this matter, they are called "squatter settlements", inheriting the stigmatizing language of the colonial authorities.

However, in the only substantial demographic study about their formation, Leo van Grunsven's little noticed but insightful urban geography work, Patterns of Housing and Intra-urban Migration of Low-Income Groups in Singapore, with Particular Reference to Urban Kampong Dwellers (1983), uses the term "urban kampongs" and treats them as "autonomous settlements". He points out that until there was a need to clear the dwellers for development, landlords would commonly sublet idle land to tenants on a monthly basis; so did the government, which frequently gave out Temporary Occupation Licenses for the temporary occupation of public land (Van Grunsven 1983, pp. 60-62). In fact, the authorities were well aware of the incongruity of the term "squatter": the 1955 Land Clearance and Resettlement Working Party conceded it was really dealing with tenants, since "it has been a long established custom in Singapore for owners of land not required for immediate development to rent out plots on a month-to-month basis and for the tenant to erect thereon a house" (Land Clearance and Resettlement Working Party 1956, p. 7). The association of urban kampong dwellers with criminality through their allegedly illegal occupation of land is significant, and needs to be scrutinized and analysed. This paper will take as a case study Bukit Ho Swee, a kampong off the western end of the Singapore River inhabited mainly by working class Chinese. There, a great fire (the biggest in Singapore's history) broke out on 25 May 1961, rendering 15,694 people homeless and leading to their rehousing in HDB flats. It also heralded the beginning of the social and economic transformation of Singapore under the PAP Government.

State and Social Intervention

Social interventions by the state had punctuated Singapore society since the late nineteenth century. Brenda Yeoh's invigorating work of historical geography, Contesting Space in Colonial Singapore (1996), peels away the facade of colonial hegemony to unravel a perpetual struggle between the British and Chinese working class over the use of urban space. Yeoh views the work of the Singapore Municipal Authority on sanitary surveillance, urban planning, street naming, sewage disposal, verandah use, and the regulation of burial sites as seeking to "facilitate colonial rule and express colonial aspirations and ideals", which targeted both the private spaces of working class Chinese and their public environment (Yeoh 2003, p. 16). The pre-war British planners already had a strong mental image of an "Asian housing problem [that] was inextricably conflated with problems of overcrowding, insanitation, disease, and the 'inexorable logic of Asian ignorance'" (Yeoh 2003, p. 136). The Municipality and later the Singapore Improvement Trust (SIT) sought to regulate the number of cubicles in the shophouse, a uniquely Chinese house form which served both commercial and residential functions and was at once private and public.

After the war, these social interventions continued. Although the British colonial regime was undermined by the debilitating psychological and financial effects of World War Two, its weakness is not to be equated with political lethargy and withdrawal. Under pressure from the United States as well as local political movements to decolonize, the British arguably had a greater and more urgent incentive to remake their colonies in what time that remained before their withdrawal so as to safeguard their economic and strategic interests in the region. Tim Harper, in his detailed historical study, The End of Empire and the Making of Malaya (1998), observes that the post-war colonial state in Malaya played an important role in ushering in the relatively liberal phase called the "Malayan Spring" and sought to remake key areas of local society. Harper, who identified many such instances of social intervention in Singapore, argued that they were aimed at creating direct allegiances among the people to the state and driven by powerful concerns about social disorder, criminality, youth delinquency, and the proletarisation of the working class (Harper 1998, pp. 55-75).

Harper's analysis suggests that the work of the Social Welfare Department in Singapore (established in 1946) and other social organisations that received substantial British and later, PAP support, such as the Family Planning Association (established 1949), Children's Society (established 1952) and Singapore Council of Social Service (established 1958), must be viewed as attempts to establish and extend the authority of the state. Alongside the constitutional and political developments, these policies sought to lay the foundation for a modern, planned, sanitized, and disciplined Singapore.

Post-war Singapore was also a time of dramatic demographic change. The 1957 census shows that the total population grew at an annual rate of 4.26 per cent between 1947 and 1957, rising from 938,000 to 1.45 million. Seventy-eight per cent of the increase was by natural increase as against migration, supported by a more balanced sex ratio (1,117 males per 1,000 females). Sixty-four per cent of the population was consequently locally-born. Among the Chinese, who comprised three-quarters of the population, the annual rate of increase was 3.97 per cent, and 68 per cent were locally born. The Chinese population had also become younger, with the mean age falling from 25.1 years in 1947 to 23 years in 1957, among whom 43.8 per cent were young dependents under the age of 15 and 49.1 per cent were between the working ages of 15 and 54. These demographic changes crystallized in the urban nuclear...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



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