Squatters, Colonial Subjects and Model Citizens: Informal Housing in Southeast Asia and Hong Kong after World War II

By Loh Kah Seng

Abstract

Informal housing communities of semi-autonomous urban migrants emerged rapidly at the margins of Southeast Asian cities and Hong Kong after World War II. Their development constituted an important moment in post-war social history: the dwellers eked out a livelihood on land which initially lay beyond official control, relying on family, kinship and community ties to cope with the challenges of employment, environmental disaster and eviction. What was also historic was the response of the colonial and postcolonial states to the informal housing.

Influenced partly by the advice of international experts on the need for controlled development, the region’s governments criminalised informal housing, represented their dwellers as socially inert and warned of the dire impact such unplanned settlements — like a contagion — would have on the character and future of the society and nation. To varying degrees, they also undertook to either resettle the dwellers in emergency public housing or reorganise social life in the settlements through aided self-help. Only in the former British-ruled city-states of Singapore and Hong Kong did the authorities succeed in transforming the face and character of the city. Elsewhere, the pressure of patronage politics and the preference for “prestige projects” greatly limited the scope of the actual reorganisation. Drawing upon James Scott’s concept of “high modernist” planning and social governance, this paper examines the origins and development of informal settlements in urban Southeast Asia and Hong Kong and the different outcomes of state efforts to transform their residents from “squatters”, to colonial subjects and, finally, model citizens of new nation-states.

In Seeing Like a State (1998), James Scott discusses how high modernist states characteristically seek to reduce the great complexity of city life to scientifically simplified and visually legible “abridged maps”. High modernism, he explains, is a philosophy of social governance based on a “self-confidence about scientific and technical progress … the mastery of nature (including human nature) and, above all, the rational design of social order commensurate with the scientific understanding of natural laws”. He observes that the success of such an ambitious reordering of society hinges on the balance between state-society relations: an authoritarian state with sufficient coercive power to implement its plans, and the absence of a strong civil society capable of challenging it (Scott, 1998, pp. 4–5).

This social-political framework for understanding the transformation of cities is useful for approaching the history of housing in Southeast Asia and Hong Kong after World War II. As I have argued elsewhere, in Singapore, the resettlement of large numbers of residents of kampungs (villages) located at the margins of the city in emergency public housing after the war was an ambitious state project which occurred over the course of the late colonial and early post-colonial periods. The rehousing did not merely constitute a change in shelter, but effectively transformed the semi-autonomous informal dweller into a model citizen of the newly independent Singapore state. Mass resettlement, then, critically reforged the balance of state-society relations in favour of the former.

This social transformation of a community that was discursively labelled as “squatters” to “Singapore subjects” was achieved by the People’s Action Party (PAP) government. But the project had its origins in the post-war British programme of decolonisation, which used social policy — including housing policy — as a means to restructure Singapore society. By the completion of the second five-year housing plan at the end of the 1960s, the PAP government’s public housing agency, the Housing and Development Board (HDB), had removed most of the informal settlements in the city and resettled their former residents in planned public housing. The residents were being socialised into becoming model citizens whose lives were now much more intimately bound up with the due processes of the state (Loh, 2007, 2009a, 2009b, 2009c, 2009d).

The transformation of Singapore into a high modernist state through the rehousing of the informal population merits comparison with other cities in Southeast Asia and Hong Kong. The immediate post-war years constitute an important historical period in terms of demographic, social and housing changes and of rehousing efforts by the state. As Richard Harris aptly points out, the British concern with housing in its colonies had arisen not because conditions were drastically deteriorating but because they were changing radically from the pre-war situation (Harris, 2002, p. 4).

By 1961, there were an estimated 750,000 informal dwellers in Jakarta (constituting 25% of the city’s population), 320,000 in Manila (23%), 250,000 in Singapore (26%) and 100,000 in Kuala Lumpur (25%) (McGee, 1970, p. 123). In Manila, 71,000 out of 177,000 dwellings were constructed with light or mixed (wood and thatched roof ) material (Philippines, 1962, p. 22). The state’s response to the informal housing development was historic. After the war, both the colonial and post-colonial states first began to view the development of informal housing as a major social problem. In India, the post-colonial government began to systematically compile information on informal settlements for the official census in the 1950s. This demonstrated the important link between knowledge, developmental planning and societal transformation (Schenk, 2001, pp. 18–9). In Southeast Asia, however, official research into informal housing was more uneven: only in Singapore, Hong Kong and, to some extent, the Philippines were there systematic studies and commissioned surveys on housing (Karnjanaprakorn et al., 1979, p. 73).

Rehousing campaigns in the post-war period also throw light on the current trends and problems in urbanisation and urban housing development in Southeast Asia (Jones, 2002). Another aspect of the historical continuity is that the forced eviction of informal dwellers continues in many countries in contemporary Southeast Asia, which has drawn attention as a violation of the basic human right to shelter (Olds, Bunnell & Leckie, 2002, Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions, 2002, Human Rights Watch 2006). Some scholars have also framed the unique character of social life in informal settlements in the contemporary Middle East, Latin America and South Asia as a response to the recent wave of economic liberalisation and globalisation. This “new way of life” can be usefully compared to the Southeast Asian context and can be traced back to the immediate post-war years (Roy & AlSayyad, 2004).

This essay is an exploratory paper. It revisits the literature on the clearance of informal settlements between the end of the war and the 1970s, and is supplemented by some official publications. The paper examines how the late colonial and early post-colonial states sought to discursively criminalise semi-autonomous informal dwellers as “squatters” and then transform them into colonial subjects and, subsequently, model citizens (only in Hong Kong did this disciplinary project remain “colonial” in the period under study). It seeks to identify major questions and themes in the period under study: how informal settlements developed after the war; the character of social life within; why and how the state discursively represented the residents as “squatters” eking out an insanitary, dangerous and socially undesirable existence; the extent to which the state’s attempts to remove or reorganise such housing were influenced by international consultants; and the great difficulty of rehousing the residents in high modernist public housing.

Study of the immediate post-war period also offers us an exciting possibility, because the historical archives on the period have begun to be declassified. As Richard Harris, Alan Smart and others have argued, archival research helps to problematise some of the foundational myths in the history of housing. This preliminary study hopes to pave the way for further empirical research and to encourage interviews with both officials and residents involved in the rehousing in the region.

Hong Kong, of course, does not formally belong to Southeast Asia, but I have drafted it into the discussion because of its similarity to Singapore and because it offers another case study of British colonial policy towards informal housing. In terms of vocabulary, this paper problematises the criminalising official label “squatters”, which simply denotes a conferred illegal status. It uses instead the term “informal housing”, which refers more usefully to how the residents of such housing stood socially, economically and culturally outside the conventions of the state and mainstream society. In using the term “informal housing”, I do not assume it to be the inferior accommodation of socially disorganised or passive people, but as “an important contribution to shelter”, which aptly serves the needs of those who reside in them (Kasarda & Crenshaw, 1991, p. 480).

The Movement Of People And Development Of Semi-Autonomous Communities

The proliferation of informal housing in Southeast Asia and Hong Kong was closely tied to the largescale movement of people after the war, particularly transnational, rural-urban and intra-urban migration. In some cases, the war had precipitated the internal migration. Most Southeast Asian cities did not experience heavy fighting and were spared serious damage to their housing stock. However, Manila’s war-struck ruins attracted rural migrants. The capital received a major influx of rural migrants during the Japanese occupation into Intramuros, the original inner city of the capital and the former centre of Spanish administration, which had been devastated by the fighting (Ooi, 2005, p. 58). After the war, Intramuros’ population, mostly Filipinos, jumped from 987 in 1948 to 13,243 in 1960, and most of its dwellings were made of light materials (Philippines, 1962, pp. 30–4). Other rural migrants in the Philippines had fled from a different, chronic form of disaster — typhoons, which perennially struck provinces such as Samar and Leyte (Juppenlatz, 1970, p. 103). The population movements caused by various types of emergencies were in addition to the high rate of population growth of 3% per annum between 1948 and 1960 in the Philippines. Much of the growth occurred in the dense population centres in Luzon and the Visayas (Dwyer, 1976, p. 133). By 1960, nearly half of the population of Manila and the nearby province of Rizal was not locally born; among these, 30% were slum or informal dwellers whose numbers were growing at the high rate of 12% per year (Hollnsteiner, 1976, p. 174). Three years later, an official survey confirmed that the number of informal dwellers in metropolitan Manila had grown steadily from 23,000 in 1946 to 98,000 in 1956 and 282,730 in 1963 (Juppenlatz, 1970, p. 97).

What occurred in the Philippines mirrored developments elsewhere in the region, where surges in population, particularly in the urban populations, were buoyed by both rapid natural increases and high rates of migration (Yeung & Lo, 1976, p. xviii). By 1957, Malaya became the most urbanised state in Southeast Asia, with 42.7% of its population living in urban areas, followed by the Philippines (35.3% in 1956), Burma (15.3% in 1953), Thailand (11.8% in 1960) and Indonesia (9.1% in the 1950s) (Milone, 1976, p. 91). In Malaya, the movement of people into informal housing had developed over the long term due to the impact of national and global events such as the Great Depression, the Japanese Occupation and the communist insurgency in 1948–60 (Johnstone, 1981, p. 367). The Federal Territory of Malaya, which includes the capital Kuala Lumpur, experienced an annual population growth rate of 7% between 1960 and 1970, driven evenly by natural increase and rural-urban migration (as cited in Lim, 1976, p. 43). Most of the migrants in Malaya, as elsewhere in the region, were from low-income backgrounds: in 1958, 62% of the urban Chinese households earning a monthly income of $150 or under were living in informal wooden houses, compared with 49% for those on incomes of $151–$300, 30% for those on incomes of $301–$500, and 16% for those of incomes of $501–$1,000 (Malaya, Department of Statistics 1958, pp. 51–4).

The peninsula’s developments were similar to those in Singapore; the island’s high annual population growth rate of 4.5% from 1947–57 was buoyed partly by migrants from China and Malaya rejoining their families in Singapore or seeking to start new families, but much more by large numbers of people marrying and having multiple children after the war. This population surge made sharing cubicles in the shophouse — the established housing form for the low-income Chinese in the inner city — impossible, whereupon either the migrants arrived directly in the informal settlements or the new families moved from the overcrowded shophouses to the margins of the city to seek larger accommodation (van Grunsven 1983, pp. 97–8).

In Thailand, the urban population also increased at a high annual rate of 5% between 1947 and 1960 (compared with 3% for the rural population) with the greatest urban growth taking place in the central region around Bangkok (Goldstein, 1976, pp. 102–5). In Klong Toey, one of the biggest informal settlements in Bangkok, nearly four-fifths of the inhabitants in 1970 had been born in the central region, with only a fifth having arrived from the northeast (Sakornpan et al., 1971, p. 69). Similarly, urbanisation in post-war Hong Kong was driven by heavy immigration. By 1961, the colony’s pre-war population had nearly doubled to 3.1 million, due mainly to the influx of refugees from war-torn China, many of whom settled down in the colony’s informal housing (Dwyer, 1976, p. 135). At the end of the decade, Hong Kong was still receiving an average of 90,000 immigrants annually (United Nations, 1971, p. 47). In Surabaya, the second largest city in Indonesia, heavy rural-urban migration had taken place since the Japanese Occupation, with the migrants arriving in the city to join their urban relatives and establish a new livelihood. Many of them settled into the informal housing located within the city limits (Dick, 2003, pp. 365–7).

The post-war urbanisation and proliferation of informal housing in Southeast Asia and Hong Kong was viewed pejoratively by the state and even academics, who framed their disapproval in academic terms or jargon (Lloyd, 1979, p. 53). Using the Western model of urbanisation as a yardstick, many academics in the 1950s and 1960s conceptualised the Southeast Asian phenomenon as deviant cases of “over-urbanisation” or “pseudo-urbanisation”. These concepts reflected the basic argument that urbanisation in the region greatly outstripped the country’s industrial capacity and the availability of jobs for the new migrants (Yeung & Lo, 1976, pp. xvi–xvii). In 1957, the United Nations held that the migration of farmers into informal housing in the city represented no more than the transplanting of rural poverty into an urban context (as cited in Dwyer, 1976, p. 132; Sendut, 1966, p. 487).

In contrast to such official and academic views, the development of informal settlements underlines the combination of social dynamism, opportunism and resistance of the migrants who had settled into them. Scholars such as Janice Perlman and Manuel Castells countered in the 1970s that informal dwellers ought not to be viewed as “marginal people” who had failed to integrate into the fabric of mainstream society and had been relegated to the physical and economic fringes of the city. In fact, informal dwellers were, to some extent, socially, economically and politically well integrated into mainstream society. Janice Perlman and Manuel Castells argued that the notions of social marginality, including Oscar Lewis’ concept of the “culture of poverty” in slums, were really discursive instruments of social control intended to keep informal communities disenfranchised and leave them disempowered (Perlman, 1976; Castells, 1983; Lewis, 1959). Even the positive-sounding term “slum of hope”, which assumes that these dwellers seek acceptance from the dominant political culture and economic structure of the country, ought to be problematised (Lloyd, 1979, pp. 33–4).

The social history of informal settlements in Southeast Asia and Hong Kong remains an important area of research, in which oral history or ethnographic approaches will prove useful. One important outcome of such research is in highlighting the agency of informal dwellers. Far from being passive, the settlement of urban migrants into unauthorised informal housing can be viewed as constituting “the quiet encroachment of the ordinary”, which in the long term significantly expanded the social power of the community vis-à-vis the formal authority of the state (Bayat, 2004, p. 90). Such an agency can also be viewed as a form of covert everyday social resistance — which James Scott has called “the [weapon] of the weak” — that nevertheless manages to undermine the hegemony of the state in the long run (Scott, 1985, 1990).

It has been convincingly argued that social life in informal housing areas was not always dangerous or criminal, as frequently depicted, but socially cohesive and vibrant. This underlines the fact that although they were tied to the formal structures of the state and mainstream society, informal communities subscribed to different cultural and social norms and remained semi-autonomous. The poor physical state and unplanned nature of the housing often belied the strong sense of community and healthy living in the settlements, facts which high modernist planners and commentators, in their visual approach these settlements, frequently failed to acknowledge. In Brazil, Kenya, Ivory Coast and Chile, informal dwellers possessed a high level of social organisation and a strong work ethic. They also participated in local and national politics both formally and informally, through the heads of their ethnic communities and through gangs (Berg-Schlosser & Kersting, 2003, pp. 4–6, 210).

The agency and social organisation of informal communities in post-war Southeast Asia and Hong Kong are clearly demonstrated in contemporary ethnographic studies by social workers and students. The dwellers typically established multiple layers of mutual self-help, extending from the family level to collaboration with politicians and other “outside” patrons. The residents of Klong Toey evidently felt that in 1970, there were few criminals or drug addicts in the area. Even the social workers surveying the settlement concluded that “the overall impression is not one of hopeless poverty and degradation” (Sakornpan et al., 1971, pp. 61–4). A study of another slum located in north-central Bangkok in the late 1960s found that many of the women living in informal housing worked as peddlers and petty traders to support their families. Extending naturally from such family bonds was a strong element of mutual self-help between the residents and their relatives in the settlement, who had followed them along a chain of migration into the area, and other kin in the home provinces with whom they remained in close contact. Both groups of relatives provided informal dwellers, directly and indirectly, with food, shelter, accommodation and other forms of assistance (Rabibhadana, 1975, pp. 101, 199, 214–5, 239). In post-war Hong Kong, living in unauthorised, self-built housing could be traced to a long historical tradition and carried no social stigma. For many victims in Hong Kong and Southeast Asia who had their wooden housing destroyed by fires or typhoons, the very act of returning to the site to rebuild their homes highlights not desperation or marginalisation but a stoic resilience towards the daily struggle to eke out a living (Golger, 1970, pp. 24, 31).

Slum and informal dwellers in Manila also felt that, contrary to the expectations of outsiders, their community was safe and harmonious, while their forms of mutual self-help included establishing volunteer fire brigades and anti-crime patrols (Laquian, 1971, pp. 196–7). Many slum and informal dwellers in Manila belonged not to passive communities but to those that were “psychologically attuned to take advantage of changing conditions and available opportunities”. They possessed a strong identity as residents of slum and informal housing and felt no stigma about residing in such accommodations. The residents had developed their confident identity through sustained interaction in certain social spaces in the settlement, namely, the streets, corner stores, barber shops, restaurants and bars. They possessed a strong sense of neighbourliness and community cohesion, which was nurtured by participating in social gossip. For the youths in the settlement, group identity was accorded by membership in the locality’s gangs and their unwritten codes of behaviour (Jocano, 1975, pp. 7, 20, 33–50, 105, 173–4). In post-war Singapore, similarly, there were informal forms of mutual self-help such as secret societies, while volunteer fire-fighting brigades and anti-crime patrols were also formed with the aid of both the municipal administration and leftwing anti-colonial organisations (Singapore Fire Department, 1958, p. 1; Chin, 2006; Chio, 2007).

Finally, ethnicity also played a role in the social life of informal settlements and contributed to community organisation and mutual self-help. Many settlements had been home to what had once been migrant communities, which became much more settled after the Pacific War. The reduction of municipal control during the war and the Japanese Occupation accelerated the move of families into ethnically exclusive slums and informal settlements. A Chinese quarter emerged this way in Binondo, Manila. Likewise, in Kuala Lumpur, there was a Chinese quarter in Kampong Bahru and Indian enclaves in Sentul and Brickfields (McGee, 1967, pp. 144–6; Laquian, 1979, p. 59). In post-war Malaya, a country dominated by communal politics, there were 20,000 informal dwellings in Kuala Lumpur in the mid-1960s, or a quarter of all dwellings in the city; Chinese people comprised two-thirds of the 156,000 informal dwellers (Malaysia Kementerian Penerangan, 1971, p. 5). Informal Malay dwellers were located mostly to the east, northeast and southeast of the capital, while Chinese dwellers lived in separate enclaves in the north, northeast, south, and southeast, and Indians in the north and southwest (Sen, 1979, pp. 187–8). The resettlement of informal dwellers in Malaya sometimes also followed ethnic lines: Chinese and Indians were relocated close to the inner city, and Malays rehoused further away (McGee, 1967, p. 148). In Manila, many informal settlements and slums were also ethnically homogeneous; Chinese settlements were considered far more socially and economically mobile but were also socially and culturally active in maintaining their ethnic identity (Laquian, 1971, pp. 187–8).

There were clearly different circles of mutual self-help and supportive relationships forged between informal dwellers and both insiders and outsiders. In Bangkok, the more outward social networks of community organisation were the informal patron-client relationships and web of reciprocity established with “outsiders”, including the police and other public officials (Rabibhadana, 1975, p. 241). As in the case of India, it was natural for slum and informal dwellers in Southeast Asia to seek the patronage of local politicians, community leaders and non-governmental organisations to defend their local interests (Desrochers, 2000, pp. 275–81).

The social and political organisation of informal dwellers is well-illustrated in Malaya. There, the “rural squatters” were literally a “state within a state” but also had a significant impact on urban social and political life. Many of the peninsula’s Chinese urban workers were in fact seasonal migrants from informal housing areas in the countryside. Socially mobile, many such workers joined the cities’ fledgling trade unions in the 1950s and participated in strikes with little fear of dismissal, leading to the rise of an organised labour movement in post-war Malaya (Harper, 1998, pp. 105, 107). In mid-1970s Kuala Lumpur, residents in Chan Sow Lin, an established informal settlement, possessed a strong sense of community and mutual self-help. They accepted the illegal gang elements and activities in the area as part of everyday life. By this time, the residents felt resigned to their low standard of living and the inevitability of eventual eviction from the area (Ng, 1976, pp. 37–9; Wong, 1976, pp. 39–40). In other informal settlements in Kuala Lumpur, the residents were not so socially passive: they were both knowledgeable about external events and were able to organise themselves collectively to deal with the authorities and address problems that directly affected them, the most important of which was eviction (Sen, 1979, pp. 194–5).

The very location of informal settlements in Southeast Asia and Hong Kong testifies to their social dynamism and opportunism. The urban migrants were able to construct viable livelihoods on land that lay initially beyond the official gaze. In Singapore, these settlements were located along the trunk roads at the margins of the city, on hilly ground, frequently being disused cemeteries, or over swampy land or near incinerator sites. These places were either idle or were still being deliberated on by the state and private developers as to their acquisition or development (Singapore Improvement Trust, 1957, p. 29). New urban migrants regarded such sites as suitable for both raising an expanding family and residing close to their workplace, often in the inner city, to minimise the cost of transport (Singapore Improvement Trust, 1952a).

In Malaya, too, many of the informal settlements were found on land that initially escaped the notice of state and private developers: low-lying flood plains of the main rivers, vulnerable to flooding, or on railway reserves and disused mining land, all located at the urban periphery of cities like Kuala Lumpur and Ipoh (Sendut, 1976, p. 79; Johnstone, 1981, pp. 374, 376). Kampong Setor in Kuala Lumpur, for instance, was an informal Malay housing settlement located in the urban core between a river and a railway line (McGee, 1967, p. 161). In other cases, some of the “New Villages”, established by the British colonial regime during the Malayan Emergency to resettle half a million Chinese rural villagers, were in fact placed within the redrawn municipal boundaries at the edges of cities. This included Jinjiang, the largest New Village with 13,000 people, and Ayer Panas in Kuala Lumpur, Kampong Bahru in Kuantan and Kampong Simee in Ipoh (Johnstone, 1981, p. 372; 1983, p. 299).

In Hong Kong, likewise, Chinese families built their wooden houses on steep hillsides (Dwyer, 1976, p. 132). As a British official stated in 1960, the press of refugees from the Chinese mainland had caused such a proliferation of unauthorised housing in the Victoria-Kowloon area that:

... it would have required an army of police to have restrained them. Virtually every
sizeable vacant site … was occupied, and where there was no flat land remaining,
they moved up the hillsides and colonised the ravines and slopes that were too
steep for normal development. (as cited in Dwyer, 1976, p. 136)

In Bangkok, a low-lying city, informal dwellers commonly lived over swamps or on narrow strips of land lining the city’s numerous canals. Such lands were rarely used for development and were owned by the state but had been occupied for low-income informal housing, despite their lack of waste drainage and vulnerability to floods (Giles, 2003, p. 231). Many of these settlements were located on the periphery of Bangkok, where the low prices of land made development and eviction less likely (Korff, 1986, pp. 55–7). In post-war Saigon, like Bangkok, informal settlements developed along the beaches and open canals (Ooi, 2005, p. 82).

Just beyond the municipal boundaries of Jakarta, informal settlements also developed due to a lack of planning regulation, leading to the formation of “a crowded, unhygienic and combustible jumble of housing … mostly along the trunk roads” (United Nations Mission of Experts, 1951, p. 134). In Surabaya, informal dwellers were clearly visible in large numbers in public spaces such as parks, riverbanks and railway lines in the 1950s, living without the benefit of public facilities. In 1953, there were a total of 3,000 illegal dwellings in the city, a third of which were located on former rubbish dump sites. They were given the legal status of “kampongs” by the post-colonial state so that they could be earmarked for kampong improvement schemes, which had resumed in 1949 (Dick, 2003, pp. 144, 210).

In metropolitan Manila, where the poor lived in segregated sectors of the city apart from middle- and higher-income communities, many of them resided in unauthorised housing built within the ruins of Intramuros (Ooi, 2005, p. 56). Other informal dwellers lived near their workplace in the centre of the city, such as in Tondo; Casbah; the piers of Cebu; park sites in Davao, Mindanao; and near swamps, factories, fish ponds, market areas, railway tracks and army reservations; in addition, there were also large numbers of “foreshore squatters”, “shop squatters” and “wagon squatters” in Philippine cities (Abrams, 1970b, pp. 141–2; Laquian, 1969, p. 6; Stone, 1973, pp. 70–1). In 1959, flash floods struck many such families living along the dried-up riverbeds and riverbanks of Manila, causing numerous deaths (Juppenlatz, 1970, p. 95).

The location of the informal settlements at the physical and administrative margins of the Southeast Asian city caused the post-war state much anxiety. Here, as Mary Douglas observed, was where official control was weakest and where, as the state feared, any social change could profoundly alter the basic character of the entire society (Douglas, 2002, p. 150). I have argued elsewhere how the building of low-cost, emergency public housing at the administrative periphery of Singapore city, frequently over the sites of informal settlements themselves, were in essence an attempt by the state to restore a margin perceived to have been dangerously overrun by dense illegal housing and semi-autonomous communities living beyond the formal structures and social norms of the state (Loh, 2009a). Preceding and reinforcing this public housing programme in Singapore was a controlling official discourse against informal housing and its residents.

The Myth Of The ‘Squatter’ And The Emergency Discourse Of Rehousing

In post-war Singapore, the British regime’s criminalisation of informal dwellers as “squatters” was a discursive and politically driven act. The term conveys an instant impression of both illegality and social inertia and forges a powerful sense of social crisis. As Greg Clancey has argued, such a discourse of emergency served to empower the high modernist state with the moral authority to intervene robustly in the everyday lives of informal dwellers (Clancey, 2004, p. 53). In fact, most of them were not squatters but rent-paying tenants, having settled in informal housing as migrants from China and Malaya or from the overcrowded shophouses in the inner city after the war. The Land Clearance and Resettlement Working Party of 1955, an official committee established to investigate the problem of unauthorised wooden housing, rejected the term “squatter”, as it had 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” (Singapore Land Clearance and Resettlement Working Party, 1956, pp. 2, 3).

The term “squatter”, together with a whole list of other official lexicons such as “emergency”, “fire”, “clearance”, and “resettlement”, constituted an entire discourse rationalising the state’s social intervention in the lives of a semi-autonomous community, including, first and foremost, their resettlement. In Malaysia, similarly, informal dwellers, in being classified as “squatters” also became “anti-development” within the developmentalist discourse of the state (Yeoh, 2001, pp. 116, 119). In 1965, this criminalisation was extended to Malay informal dwellers through the implementation of the National Land Code. Hitherto, Malays, who were regarded as bumiputra (sons of the soil) with special rights by the state, had been free under customary law to occupy vacant land in both the pre-colonial and colonial periods, while the only “squatters” during the British period, in the legal sense, were the Chinese (Kassim, 1982, pp. 5, 12).

This criminalising discourse also appeared in post-war Thailand. Here, only a small minority of the informal dwellers were technically squatters. Like in Singapore and Malaya, the majority were renters who had been granted permission on a temporary basis by landlords to build houses on their land (Giles, 2003, p. 213). In Manila, many informal dwellers confidently viewed themselves not as squatters but as rent-paying tenants. In 1962, when the Philippine state sought to clear informal dwellers in Singalong and took them to court, the residents argued that they were not squatters but “lessees who had been paying rentals”. Such an assertive self-perception was rooted in the popular belief among Filipinos that public land in the country was not the possession of all but belonged to no one, and could be freely occupied (Stone, 1973, pp. 40–3, 71–3, 80).

In Hong Kong, as Alan Smart as argued, the illegality of “squatters” was based on an official distinction between building land and agricultural land, which stipulated that residents could erect buildings only on the former. This distinction was made at the beginning of the 20th century and had been hotly contested; it could lead to the criminalisation of residents who had built unauthorised houses on their own agricultural land. The legal distinction reveals how the British colonial regime had played a central role in the social production of space in Hong Kong long before it launched its first major public housing programme in the mid-1950s. The colonial land policy made it difficult for the private sector to satisfy the requirements of the complex building regulations to convert agricultural land into building land. The construction of informal wooden housing consequently became illegal (Smart, 2003, pp. 212–3).

The use of a criminalising discourse of illegality and social inertia to provide the state with a powerful mandate to rehouse unauthorised housing dwellers in public housing in Southeast Asia and Hong Kong did not simply aim to represent. Rather, it sought to depict the “squatter” as the liminal other who needed to be eliminated so that the city could be re-created in the political and public imagination (Mayne, 1990, pp. 8–9). In short, the term “squatter” was politically determined. Scholars in India have contended that

the notion of illegality was really a fabrication since the laws of the state served chiefly the interests of the powerful. Cities, as John Desrochers argued, had always been built from the bottom up, while planned urban development was a recent colonial invention; the poor had the right to build their own housing if the government was unable to provide for them (Desrochers, 2000, pp. 17–22, 27).

The discursive vocabulary of “squatters” was common in official statements on housing in Southeast Asia and Hong Kong because it had strong transnational links and advocates. The 1951 United Nations Mission of Experts, which visited informal settlements in Thailand, India, Indonesia, Malaya, Pakistan, the Philippines and Singapore as part of its survey, reported that “squatting on somebody else’s land has become an art and a profession” in the Philippines (United Nations Mission of Experts, 1951, p. 157). Charles Abrams, an influential American urban planner in the post-war period, warned that, although most of them were law-abiding citizens, the residents of informal housing formed a “formidable threat to the structure of private rights established through the centuries”, the rule of law and the basic sovereignty of the state (Abrams, 1970a, p. 11, 1970b, p. 143, 1966, p. 23).

Charles Abrams and other Western urban planners such as Morris Juppenlatz frequently advised Southeast Asian governments on housing and urban planning after the war. Morris Juppenlatz was a United Nations town planner who had worked in post-war Manila, Hong Kong and Rio de Janeiro. Drawing from the stark, powerful metaphors of disease and contagion, he represented informal housing as “a plague” and an “urban sickness”. Morris Juppenlatz reveals his high modernist mind in expressing his distaste for the physical appearance of informal settlements, where “[t]he outward appearance of the malady, the urban squatter colonies, when viewed from the air, from a helicopter, is that of a fungus attached to and growing out from the carapace of the city”. He blamed many of the cholera outbreaks in Philippine cities on the physical environment of the informal settlements and the social habits of their residents. The basic solution, he urged, was to organise the residents’ integration into the state as tax-paying citizens. In this, the government’s role was pivotal and needed to be “based on the scientific method and planned urban development throughout the entire nation” (Juppenlatz, 1970, pp. 1–5, 41, 104, 212). Charles Abrams also warned that the “diseases of housing rival those in pathology” (Abrams, 1965, p. 40).

British officials in the colonies fully endorsed such abject views of informal housing. In 1948, the British housing authorities in Malaya represented the “mushrooming” informal housing as being “temporary buildings of a very inferior type, erected without regard to the elementary requirements of sanitation, light and air” (Johnstone, 1983, p. 298). In Hong Kong, similarly, the connection between the clearance of informal housing and state interventions into public health matters was similarly strong: informal housing became illegal when British colonial officials ruled it to be unhealthy for habitation (Smart, 2006, p. 32). In Singapore, the 1947 Housing Committee also reported that the unplanned urbanisation and development of slum and informal settlements in the city after the war were “detrimental to health and morals” (Singapore 1947, p. 11), and in literally being “schools for training youth for crime” (Singapore Improvement Trust, 1947).

The likening of informal housing development to the spread of disease in official and even academic discourse in the immediate post-war period simply underlined the social and moral danger the residents were alleged to pose. They were regarded not only as a threat to themselves but also to the fabric of society at large. Also, many official and academic commentators did not fail to point to the alleged prevalence of crime and gangsterism in the informal settlements. Morris Juppenlatz emphasised that the Oxo and Sigue Sigue — organised criminal gangs in Manila — were based in informal housing areas (Juppenlatz, 1970, p. 107). In Jakarta, groups of djembel-djembel (vagabonds), also based in slums and informal settlements, gained a reputation for being responsible for much of the crime in the city (as cited in McGee, 1967, p. 159). In Malaysia, increased overcrowding in the cities produced “a mood of urban anxiety”, with which not only the state but also the middle class viewed their values to be coming under severe threat (Harper, 1998, p. 218). The Ministry of Local Government and Housing depicted informal settlements in Kuala Lumpur in 1971 as “seedbeds of secret societies and racketeers” (Malaysia Kementerian Penerangan, 1971, p. 42). In Singapore, too, the PAP government portrayed slum and informal housing as “breeding grounds of crime and disease”, where “[t]he incidence of tuberculosis is higher here than anywhere else on the island, as is the incidence of crime and gangsterism” (Choe, 1969, p. 163). Frequently, commentators projected their anxieties onto the dwellers themselves, as T. G. McGee stated, “[f ]ear of eviction, fear of fire, fear of crime — fear is the governing force of the squatter area” (McGee, 1970, p. 126). They, however, failed to note that the residents themselves usually did not hold such views.

Another international dimension of the emergency housing discourse was related to the Cold War and the attempt of Western planners to determine the character of the post-colonial societies in Southeast Asia. Informal residents, understood to be resistant to resettlement, were seen to constitute “a potentially dangerous mass of political dynamite”, wherein lay the deadly possibility for anti-establishment and revolutionary politics (McGee, 1967, p. 170). Charles Abrams acutely feared how the rural-urban migration was leading many Asian cities to relive the unfortunate history of Western cities:

[Asian cities] have become the haven of the refugee, the hungry, the politically oppressed. The Filipino hinterlanders fleeing the Huks pour into Manila, the Hindus
escaping the Moslems head into New Delhi, and the victims of Chinese communism
head into Hong Kong. (Abrams, 1966, p. 10)

In Malaya, the British perceived locally born Chinese of the first generation, who did not speak English and whose fathers were immigrants, as a great menace to peace; their numbers were “expanding in labour forces and squatter settlements ... [and] nothing can be done to convert them into Malayan citizens” (Britain Colonial Office, 1948). The Malaysian state, which won with British support the counter-insurgency against the communists, maintained that the clearance of informal housing was “not only in the best interests of Kuala Lumpur as a capital city but also to foster economic growth, improve social standards and improve security thereby making for greater political stability” (Malaysia Kementerian Penerangan, 1971, p. 29). In 1968, political scientist Samuel Huntington also wrote of how an enforced programme of urbanisation in South Vietnam, which was already 40% urbanised because of war refugees moving into the cities, offered an important way for the anti-communist regime to defeat the Vietcong insurgents based in the countryside (Huntington, 1964, pp. 648, 652).

The fear of communism was deeply embedded in the minds of Western, particularly American, urban planning experts. It forged a strong, although by no means straightforward, link between their ideas and practices and the housing programmes that emerged in post-war Southeast Asia. As Charles Abrams warned, unlike the institutional and cultural buffers that existed against communism in Europe, Asian countries were openly vulnerable to the spread of communism. The “housing famine”, he cautioned, could easily encourage the ascendancy of Marxism, and “today’s masses” could turn into “tomorrow’s mobs”. Such an ideological view of urban housing reflected his belief that the city was the frontier in the post-colonial struggle to establish peaceful, democratic and stable societies in the less developed world. Asian cities were not only sites of great social and demographic growth; they were also politically explosive places, where the housing crisis represented a serious threat to both national development and global stability (Abrams, 1966, pp. 287–8, 296). The 1962 United Nations Ad Hoc Group, which Charles Abrams chaired, likewise believed that housing and urban development were activities in which “social and economic progress meet” (United Nations, 1962, pp. 1, 9–19).

‘Linking The International, National And Local: Public and Aided Self-Help Housing’

The discursive criminalisation of informal settlements strongly suggests that post-war rehousing policies in Southeast Asia and Hong Kong did not develop in isolation within the political boundaries of emerging nation-states. They were very much part of a transnational project in which external ideas were imposed on or, more commonly, adapted to the local context. In the aftermath of the war, decolonisation gathered apace in the American, British and subsequently Dutch and French territories in Asia, even as a bipolar world emerged. There was much concern and effort on the part of Western planning experts to ensure that the citizenry in the former colonies did not traverse the anti-colonial, pro-communist path. The United Nations, dominated in this period by the Western states, sending numerous field experts to countries in the less developed world, including Southeast Asia and Hong Kong. Their consultancy work did not simply entail offering advice on housing but also included helping the national governments prepare master plans for coordinating housing construction within a national framework for developmental planning.

The United Nations also collaborated with international agencies working indirectly on housing in the less developed countries and offered fellowships to train urban planners. Charles Abrams emphasised the importance of international cooperation and the systematic provision of international and American aid to assist housing programmes in less developed countries. This, he urged, was critical in the context of the Cold War because the Soviet Union was also providing aid to the less developed world in its pursuit of friendly client states (Abrams, 1966, pp. 91, 242; United Nations, 1962, pp. 46–58).

Recent work on the transnational history of housing after World War II has highlighted both similarities and differences in the housing practices of countries in Southeast Asia and Hong Kong. In resettling families en masse in public housing, as Greg Clancey argued, British policy in the region was exceptional. Britain’s ambitious post-war rehousing campaigns in its three colonies were responses to what was believed to be the growing threat of Chinese communism. Accordingly, the British sought to relocate Chinese farmers in Malaya to planned New Villages in order to undercut the social support for the largely Chinese Malayan Communist Party during the Emergency between 1948 and 1960, and to achieve the same objective of undermining support for the communists south of the peninsula in Singapore by removing informal dwellers to planned emergency public housing. In Hong Kong, too, the British sought to safely rehouse refugees from China in similar emergency housing in order to avoid a diplomatic dispute with the Chinese Communist Party. By contrast, Greg Clancey argued that the colonial and post-colonial states in other Asian countries either had less inclination to pursue mass resettlement projects, as in China and Japan, or carried out only minor rehousing where expedient in order to redevelop the site, as was practised in the Philippines, Thailand, Korea and Indonesia.

In particular, Clancey maintained that the rehousing of Chinese farmers in the New Villages in Malaya and the urban resettlement project in Singapore should really be viewed as two threads of a single historical event: both were coercive and targeted the rural or semi-rural Chinese populations. Both were also based on a strong fear of Chinese communism and attempted to forge farmers into urban wage labourers, which made the rehousing projects developmental as well as political and military in character, and illustrated the connection between the economic and ideological objectives of housing. In the mid-1950s, as Greg Clancey revealed, the Singapore Improvement Trust (SIT), the de facto colonial housing authority in Singapore, recruited a number of resettlement inspectors who had served in the New Village campaign in Malaya (Clancey, 2004, pp. 39–42).

Recent archival research into Singapore housing has also revealed the influence British and American planning ideas had on the work of the SIT and the HDB respectively. Two high-profile British housing planners, George Pepler and Patrick Abercrombie, played major roles in advising on and coordinating public housing planning and development in the city-state in the 1950s. They assisted the British colonial regime’s attempt to resuscitate its rule on the island after the war. George Pepler in particular helped formulate the island’s 1958 colonial Master Plan, in which a modified form of the British new town model was exported to the Singapore context. In the 1960s, similarly, the HDB, upon the received advice of Charles Abrams, Otto Koenigsberger and Susume Kobe, robustly applied the American ideal of using public housing as a social bulwark against Chinese communism in the region by building tens of thousands of high-rise flats at the margins of the city over the former sites of informal housing. In this way, both the SIT and the HDB were drawing heavily from British and American use of rehousing as a means of reorganising social networks and re-establishing high modernist social and political control over the population (Kwak, 2009).

The British resettlement programmes had a significant if less robust and ultimately less successful American parallel in Southeast Asia. Drawing from the successful British model, which resettled thousands of Chinese informal dwellers in New Villages in Malaya, often “urbanising” them in the process, the Americans dealt with the Huk rebellion in the Philippines in the early 1950s and with the Vietcong insurgency in Vietnam a decade later by resorting to similar resettlement methods — rehousing villagers who were deemed to be sympathetic to the rebels. Mass rehousing of both rural and urban informal dwellers in the post-war period was a social form of counter-insurgency and was in effect aimed at achieving social and political consolidation (Yeung & Lo, 1976, p. xix; Jones & Richter, 1982).

Both international and local experts shared discursive and culturally inflected views on the need to transform indigenous Southeast Asian housing. The visual and social “messiness” of informal housing was deemed to be a major threat to healthy living and warranted robust state intervention. The 1951 United Nations Mission of Experts to South and Southeast Asia, led by the American planner Jacob Crane, warned that “[p]revailing conditions in Asia create the greatest housing problem in the world”. In the countries it visited, the mission abhorred the “ravages of tuberculosis”, which thrived in overcrowded slums and informal housing and the fact that “humans and animals are housed together within the same walls”. It urged that the national government be directly involved in the centralised planning of housing and community development in general. While it acknowledged the great costs involved in a comprehensive public housing programme, the mission reminded the Asian governments that, when rehoused, “the lower-income groups would be adequately housed in healthy, modern, self-contained neighbourhoods, where young people could develop into valuable and healthy citizens, who would help to increase the prosperity of the country in the future”. Public housing, in particular, “should be considered … as a sound investment for good citizenship” (United Nations Mission of Experts, 1951, pp. 10–11, 20, 142, 163).

Notwithstanding such transnational influence, however, Western recommendations on housing reform were often selectively or inadequately implemented in Southeast Asia. Recent scholarship has highlighted the fact that some Southeast Asian states, in principle at least, preferred to build modern public housing. As Richard Harris and others have pointed out, the archival evidence strongly suggests that many of the recommendations of international housing experts were either were not successfully implemented or even ignored by the post-colonial governments.

The three key framers and movers of this Anglo-American-led international housing policy were Jacob Crane of the US-based Housing and Home Finance Agency between 1945 and 1953, G. A. Atkinson of the British Colonial Office (1948–62) and Ernest Weissman in the Housing, Building and Planning Branch of the United Nations (1951–65). Richard Harris’ research demonstrates that these and other consultants from the United Nations, the International Labour Organisation and British and American housing and development agencies never solely advocated the option of public housing in the immediate post-war period. They also supported the idea of aided self-help housing and emphasised the role of the private sector in housing the people. Particularly among the American experts, it was felt that self-help housing was a necessary and pragmatic step in the transition towards permanent but more expensive houses built by the private sector in less developed countries. The 1951 United Nations Mission of Experts strongly recommended aided self-help housing as a way of dispersing overcrowded slum dwellers to the suburbs or new satellite towns. Such housing, it argued, could produce “more and better houses and communities than any other method, and at far less money cost” (United Nations Mission of Experts, 1951, pp. 19, 30; Harris & Giles, 2003, p. 177).

The British planners had a more established belief in public housing than their American counterparts. Britain had already considered introducing public housing in its colonies before the Pacific War, announcing, as early as 1940 that colonial administrations would be made responsible for improving housing conditions throughout the empire. Three years after the war ended, the Colonial Office appointed G. A. Atkinson as its housing adviser, a signal of the importance of public housing in its post-war public policy in the colonies. Ambitious housing programmes subsequently commenced in British colonies in Southeast Asia, sub-Saharan Africa (such as in Nairobi, Kenya) and the West Indies (in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad and Tobago; and in Kingston, Jamaica). By 1956, London had pledged financial support for housing projects for the development of both the rural and urban areas in the colonies.

Even after most of its territories were seceded to decolonisation in the 1960s, British housing influence continued in an indirect form on the post-colonial governments. But the British colonial governments quickly realised that, given the high costs involved, the public housing programmes could not resolve the housing crisis in the colonies. Moving closer to the American view, the British concluded that it would be better to encourage families to own self-help housing of a temporary sort than to build public housing merely for rent (Harris & Giles, 2003, pp. 170–81; Harris 2002). In this broad pattern of transnational housing policy, Singapore was an important exception. The island’s colonial planners consistently rejected the idea of temporary wooden and attap housing. In 1955, the SIT decided that “self-help housing was ‘impracticable in Singapore’, as ‘[t]he squatter is not an experienced house builder, he wastes materials, makes constructional mistakes, or engages second rate ‘skilled labour’” (Singapore Housing & Development Board 1955).

The initial British support for public housing programmes in their colonies was tied to its larger policy of decolonisation in Southeast Asia. Decolonisation to the British meant a substantial reform of colonial society in order to establish politically stable and economically viable nation-states in the region (Tarling, 1993, pp. 157, 170, 173). Politically, with their mandate to rule severely undermined by the Pacific War and facing more assertive indigenous nationalist movements, British colonial regimes in Southeast Asia attempted to regain the consent of their subjects. For both the British and the post-colonial regimes that succeeded them, public housing projects were politically expedient because they were highly visible and gave the elected representatives of the people an excellent opportunity to obtain mass support (Harris, 2002, p. 7).

The disjuncture between what the international experts proposed and what local governments actually built is well-illustrated by the case of Thailand. As Ceinwen Giles has demonstrated, the Thai government repeatedly ignored the pragmatic recommendations of the United Nations in favour of aided self-help housing and persisted with limited public housing programmes in the 1950s and 1960s. As early as 1951, the United Nations Mission of Experts proposed the idea of aided self-help housing to the Thai government. The latter, however, decided to undertake eight major public housing projects in Bangkok between 1950 and 1972. Giles argues that this Thai reluctance to fully endorse aided self-help housing had a cultural-political explanation. The Thai state was used to its traditional role as the patron of its subjects and to implementing social policy unilaterally from above. Self-help housing, however, gave an important social role to the residents of informal housing. The government consequently preferred to build public housing, despite its obvious costs, because the policy gave it the greatest political visibility and popular approval (Giles, 2003, pp. 232–5).

Such a pragmatic official housing policy coincided with the system of patron-client relations prevailing in Thailand. As the overall patron of the people, the state gained an important measure of flexibility in its housing policy. Selected informal settlements and slums were cleared when it served the priorities of the political leadership. The country’s decision to host the 1966 Asian Games promoted a wave of public

housing construction, with government funds made immediately available for the project. At other times, clearance was carried out to remove “eyesores” sited near the royal palace in the capital.

In general, however, the Thai government treated the other slums and informal settlements with what seemed to be benign neglect in the hope that they would simply disappear and that their residents would move into standard housing. At the same time, the “non-policy”, instead of an aided programme, enabled low-income Thais to build their own inexpensive accommodation at minimal cost to the state and without gaining land rights and tenure (Chiu, 1982, pp. 71–2, 89, 248). Such a housing policy served the pragmatic interests of both patron and client, although it prevented the Thai state from attaining a high modernist control of society, compared with Singapore and Hong Kong.

The work of Richard Harris and Ceinwen Giles is important in raising new questions about the real impact of the international housing policy and in underlining the importance of archival research to challenge popular misconceptions of housing. However, as Harris has pointed out, the ideological gap between public and aided self-help housing was not as great as one might initially suppose. Both approaches enabled the state to impose some measure of social and political control over semi-autonomous communities, albeit in different ways and to varying degrees of success. Harris observes that while public housing development was politically, if not financially, expedient to the state, aided self-help housing was more ideologically ambivalent. The aided programme possessed the potential to ascribe a degree of agency to ordinary people; taken to extremes, it suggested social and political anarchy. At the same time, however, the provision of government aid for informal housing also enabled the state to closely regulate its development and intervene in the lives of the residents (Harris, 2002).

Charles Abrams, in considering the systematic clearance of informal settlements, went further: he suggested that while a “limited number of apartment houses” might be built in the city for some workers, in the majority of cases, “a simple self-help programme properly supervised may accompany the clearance of squatter settlements” and greatly enable the removal of the remaining ones (Abrams, 1966, pp. 234–5).

The 1971 United Nations Seminar on the Improvement of Slums and Uncontrolled Settlements, which advocated aided self-help ahead of eviction and clearance, still underlined the important role of the government in improving living conditions in the settlements and, specifically, in mobilising the latent social energies of the informal communities to this end (United Nations, 1971, pp. 171–2). Depending on the way in which informal dwellers were to be mobilised, aided programmes could socialise them into the formal structures of the state as much as public housing. In the Philippines, the pilot project implementing aided-self-help housing in Barrio Magsaysay, Tondo that started in 1966 was envisaged as an urban community development programme. It aimed not only at housing improvement but also in cultivating a sense of civic consciousness in the community. The project had considerable official participation, involving one national government and two local government agencies, as well as one private civic and two foreign-based organisations (Laquian, 1969, 31, pp. 133–4). In fact, aided programmes such as the Barrio Magsaysay project could also be viewed as means by which the state and dominant elites offered aid, rather than public housing, in exchange for political support from the masses (Ruland, 1989, pp. 22–3). The basic guiding idea behind both public and aided self-help housing was that “[h]ousing must be viewed as an active environment producing a change in attitude not just physical shelter”, as United Nations planners had consistently emphasised (United Nations, 1970, as cited in Desai & Pillai, 1970, p. 253). Consequently, the real difference between public and aided self-help housing may lie more in the methods used by the state rather than an actual shift in aims.

The British “aided self-help” programme in resettling informal dwellers in the New Villages in Malaya is sometimes lauded as a rare case of success in Southeast Asia. The application of the term is contentious, since both the “aid” and “self-help” did not take place in the original settlement but in new resettlement areas. Nevertheless, the British programme demonstrates the great degree of social engineering involved in the aided self-help approach. In the large-scale, and largely involuntary, resettlement of Chinese villagers to the New Villages, the British colonial government did not provide built rural houses for the villagers, but organised an enforced form of aided self-help. The authorities supplied the sites, public utilities and roofs, while the villagers, with the government’s assistance (or insistence), used their own materials to erect the houses. The implementation of aided self-help in Malaya coincided with the recommendation of the 1951 United Nations Mission of Experts that housing planning and development in the Federation be centralised under the authority of the state (United Nations Mission of Experts, 1951, pp. 104–7).

However, what Alan Smart has termed as “impeded self-help” in Hong Kong shows that even the mere toleration of informal housing without aid may serve the interests of the colonial state in controlling such housing. He has observed that the British government adopted a policy of containment by restricting wooden dwellings to “permitted areas”, “cottage areas” and “Temporary Housing Areas”, without enabling their improvement or legalisation. This policy discouraged “new squatting” and permitted the administration to control the number of informal dwellers. In contrast to the public housing programme, the tolerated areas constituted only a minor part of the official housing policy in Hong Kong. From the end of the war until the great Shek Kip Mei fire of 1953, the authorities prevented new informal housing from being built while tolerating the existing housing until there was a need to clear them for development (Smart, 2003, p. 209; Drakakis-Smith, 1989, p. 130). The public housing programme that took off in the 1950s, particularly after the 1953 inferno, significantly reduced but did not eradicate the incidence of informal housing.

In June 1963, an official committee was established to examine the problem of informal settlements and the possibility of building low-cost public housing. It reported that the expansion of public housing in the preceding decade had not deterred the proliferation of informal housing, as both natural increase and immigration continued to swell the numbers of such housing. In that year, there were still more than half a million people living in informal housing, most of who were residing on Crown land (Report of the working party, 1963, pp. 6–8, 19–21, 53, Appendix B).

In Hong Kong, the public housing programme and the toleration policy existed side by side until 1997, when the territory was returned to China. As Alan Smart notes, the toleration was based on a deliberate bureaucratic inertia to allow informal housing to remain until there arose a developmental need to clear it (Smart, 2001, p. 40). The Hong Kong case of “impeded self-help” is important in highlighting that what may appear to be official “benign neglect” and bureaucratic impotence towards informal housing is actually much more politically motivated when viewed within the larger context of the state’s overall housing policy and its relationship with the people. In the case of “benign neglect” in Thailand discussed previously, what appeared to be a passive, even helpless, “non-policy” towards informal housing in fact served the Thai state’s role as the patron of its people at minimum political and financial cost.

The toleration policy in Hong Kong was also similar to Singapore’s experience. Contrary to the recommendations of the 1951 United Nations Mission of Experts, the Singapore authorities held firmly to the belief that “[t]he Attap [thatched roof ] Dwelling will not be appropriate within the built-up precincts of a modern City” (Singapore Improvement Trust, 1952b). In July 1953, the City Council commenced demolishing, with “no exceptions”, newly or partly erected unauthorised wooden dwellings, with its staff accompanied by policemen to prevent a breach of the peace (Singapore City Council, 1952, 1953, pp. 18, 218). In the 1958 Master Plan for the development of the island, 85,000 out of 246,000 urban dwellers were allowed to remain in 16 informal settlements designated as “tolerated attap areas”. Dwellings in these settlements were mandated to meet strict official standards: a distance of 15 feet between walls of non-flammable materials like brick or corrugated iron, or 25 feet for flammable materials; a concrete floor and drain, and corrugated iron walls for the kitchen as a fire precaution (Singapore Housing & Development Board, 1957a). This policy of toleration was a political decision undertaken against the opposition of the SIT, but it gave the British breathing space in dealing with the problem of informal housing without having to commit themselves to organising the residents through an aided programme (Master plan, 1955, pp. 26–8; Singapore Housing & Development Board, 1957b).

Alan Smart also observes that the main role of the British colonial state in Hong Kong in building public housing while tolerating some informal housing was made possible by the non-representative character of colonial rule. British policy was determined by two factors, the first of which was related to the geopolitics of the Cold War. A robust public housing programme ensured that informal dwellers removed from their land would be properly rehoused. It reduced the risks of civil disturbance, which might occur in the event of unpopular mass eviction. The British worried that the outbreak of social unrest in Hong Kong involving the informal residents, many of whom were refugees from the mainland, might precipitate the intervention of the newly installed communist government in China. The other factor was economic. The British state saw its control over land development as an important way to keep land prices high, maximise land revenues, and keep tax rates low (Smart, 1992, pp. 198–200; 2003, 214).

The political and economic factors explained why a “hyper-capitalist, colonial state would embark on a public housing programme that would eventually provide dwellings for more than half its population” (Smart, 2003, p. 211). The Hong Kong policy towards informal housing indicates how, as in the case of Singapore, semi-autonomous communities were socially and politically mobilised through rehousing. According to a 1955 Hong Kong government report, the real aim of the public housing programme was not to provide for the residents’ welfare but to maintain social order:

What was required was not primarily to improve the living conditions of that
section of the community which happened to be breaking the law relating to the
occupation of Crown land: the task was to devise a rapid and practical method, at
a cost less than prohibitive, of removing, in the interests of the whole community,
the fire risk and the threat to public health and public order presented by the worst
squatter areas (Dwyer, 1975, p. 177).

As Alan Smart surmises, the expansion of public housing and of social welfare programmes in general in Hong Kong was really an attempt by the colonial state to confer a full set of citizenship rights and obligations onto the population. This policy was especially targeted at the migrants who previously had not viewed themselves as citizens of Hong Kong but as mere sojourners from the mainland, whom the British distrusted as politically unreliable or even pro-communist (Smart, 2008). For the British, the provision of public housing was an important way to socialise informal dwellers into becoming obedient citizens and remove any pretext for China to intervene politically in the colony. In 1950, in an example of the making of trans-colonial housing associations, the British were drawing disconcerting parallels between the communist insurgency in Malaya, supported by Chinese villagers, and the informal housing situation in Hong Kong:

Dense new squatter colonies are now astride or uncomfortably close to all the main approaches to
Kowloon, and are being forced more and more towards Lyemun. It is of course dangerous to think that squatter colonies in Hong Kong are virtually the same as, or present identical problems to, the scattered and inaccessible hotbeds in Malaya. Nevertheless, even in the unlikely event of its happening in an emergency that 90% of Hong Kong’s squatters proved not only to be peaceable but also to be co-operative with the authorities, the remaining 30,000 could constitute a very real potential threat (Smart, 2008, p. 229).

Public Housing Projects, Political Patronage And Rehousing Struggles

While it preferred some amount of public housing building to aided self-help, the central difficulty the postwar Southeast Asian state faced was its inability to accumulate (or apply) sufficient political power over a sustained period to enforce a large-scale programme of informal housing clearance and public housing for the urban poor. Such a situation was directly related to the strength of informal communities, which cooperated with non-governmental organisations or local and opposition politicians, in contesting or redefining official resettlement policies.

The different outcomes of housing policies in Southeast Asian cities could be traced directly to the nature of state-society relations (Ooi, 2005, p. 13). T. G. McGee has pointed out that urban planning in less developed countries was frequently the “plaything of politics”, heavily influenced by patronage relationships. As a result, housing programmes typically involved no more than “paper plans” of mere symbolic value and quickly superseded (Dwyer, 1975, pp. 79–85). The difficulty of informal housing clearance and public housing development in post-war Southeast Asia is typically blamed on familiar reasons such as the state’s indifference or impotence, the lack of proper coordination between agencies, dated legislation, and insufficient finances. The real factor, however, is the character of state-society relations in the country.

In Thailand, as we have seen, the relationship between state and society was akin to that between patron and client. The great challenges the Thai state faced in implementing a robust public housing programme are clearly illustrated in the difficulties of coordinating housing policy and acquiring land for public housing. In 1940, housing had been one of the responsibilities of the Department of Public Welfare. It was nine years before a Department of Housing was established but it initially lacked adequate staff and the authority to carry out a comprehensive housing programme. Other public housing agencies were subsequently added to the bureaucracy, such as the Housing Welfare Bank in 1952 and a Slum Clearance Office in 1959. But it

was only in 1973, with the establishment of a democratically elected civilian government, that a National Housing Authority was established to coordinate housing on a national scale (Karnjanaprakorn et al., 1979, p. 68). As in other countries, there was legislation for the Thai government to acquire land for public purposes, but no parallel legislation to check the speculation in land values that would arise if the land slated for development were to be made public knowledge. As a result, the clearance of slums and informal settlements in Thailand was often complicated by the high costs of land (United Nations Mission of Experts, 1951, pp. 115–6, 121).

In the immediate post-war years, too, there was still no comprehensive map of Bangkok, indicating the lack of effort made by the municipal authorities in mapping out the capital. Its administration was divided among different public departments, making it difficult to coordinate housing construction with the overall development of the capital. The main umbrella agency, the City Hall, lacked the full powers of a municipal administration, while the police, water works and electricity services were officially under the Ministry of the Interior but partially independent of the ministry. Bangkok’s telephone services were likewise semi-independent of the Ministry of Communications. The Irrigation and Highways Departments controlled the canals and roads, while large tracts of land in the city belonged to the Crown or Ministry of Defence. Different government departments planned and built public housing estates while the Ministry of Industry managed industrial estates. This hampered the coordination of industrial and housing development (Sternstein, 1974, pp. 221–6). The housing problem in Thailand had a budgetary dimension but finances were not the key problem, since inadequate funding merely reflected the department’s priorities. Since 1940, nearly a fifth of the housing development in Bangkok was consequently temporary informal housing built by the residents themselves, the private sector and non-governmental organisations (which often assisted the residents against eviction) (Ooi, 2005, pp. 19, 21).

In Indonesia, similarly, both the colonial and Sukarno administrations were unable to address the urban housing crisis. As H. W. Dick surmises, regarding urban development in Surabaya, “‘[t]he period 1942 and 1966 can … be seen as a losing struggle to restore an ideal of good government that had been inherited from the colonial era, which people began to look back to more wistfully as the zaman normal (normal time)” (Dick, 2003, p. 208). The truth was that housing was not high on the agenda of both the colonial and post-colonial governments.

The Dutch colonial regime had begun to tackle the problem of informal housing after the war, albeit with limited success. A Central Institute for Reconstruction (Centrale Stichting Wederopbouw) was established after the war, which helped build the first satellite town in Jakarta, capable of housing 60,000 people. Despite this, the public housing programme was greatly hindered by political factors and there was no clear division or coordination between the central, municipal and other local authorities. As in Thailand, the Indonesian state possessed legislation empowering it to acquire land for public development, but the process was “so long and difficult that almost no use has been made of this power” up to 1951 (United Nations Mission of Experts, 1951, pp. 125, 128–9). In 1958, the Sukarno government seized some private Dutch housing in Surabaya, but it was five years before the accommodation was transferred to the control of the municipality for housing its citizens (Dick, 2003, p, 216). In the late 1950s, the government also made a modest start by establishing a Housing Section within the Department of Public Works, but it was not until 1969 when the new Suharto administration decided to launch a genuine public housing programme. Concurrently, Indonesia’s governments continued to experiment with an aided self-help policy through its kampong improvement programme (Ooi, 2005, p. 33). Both the Dutch and post-colonial governments built some public housing, but it was frequently beyond the means of the low-income working class residents of informal settlements.

The clearance of informal dwellers in Indonesian cities began in the 1950s, but was deeply politicised and proved difficult to accomplish. In Surabaya, because the Indonesian Communist Party (Partai Kommunis Indonesia) supported the rights of evicted residents, clearance operations became politically costly for the municipal authorities. The communists, who received considerable support from informal dwellers, also endorsed the act of squatting on public land. Clearance was tremendously difficult and at times resulted in violence. In 1953, R. Moestadjab Soemowidigdo, the mayor of Surabaya, decreed that vagrants and informal dwellers be rounded up and relocated to tolerated informal housing areas. In 1956, a riot broke out during a clearance operation in Pakis.

The 1960 Agrarian Law formally recognised that kampong land belonged to the occupants, but periodic clearances of informal housing by the local authorities still took place. Four years later, eviction struck informal dwellers at Pasar Turi railway station and on the banks of the Kali Mas. The evicted residents were resettled at Dupak, but by the 1960s, this locality had itself become a collection of dense informal housing. As H. W. Dick observed, the lands of post-war Surabaya had become the battleground between the state and informal dwellers, between planned development and affordable accommodation. In 1966, when the anti-communist purges took place, the Suharto regime cracked down heavily on informal settlements for supporting the Partai Kommunis Indonesia. In terms of a new public housing policy, however, the dwellers of informal housing soon understood that there was only continuity between “the New Order” and previous administrations (Dick, 2003, pp. 210–1, 368–71, 469–70).

In the Philippines, the influence of American-style democratic politics made the failure of a coordinated housing policy even more pronounced. As D. J. Dwyer surmised, the national government found it necessary to constantly “trim public policies carefully in response to pressure groups, the clamour of the most vocal sections of the population, and the necessity of keeping at least half an eye on the next election”. There was also no umbrella authority for the competing local administrations of each of the three cities and five municipalities of the massive metropolitan Manila area (Dwyer, 1976, pp. 138–9).

Richard Stone has aptly observed that the clearance of informal settlements in the Philippines was typically complicated by the personalistic nature of contractual relationships between the strong and weak, which was prevalent in the country. This was, in reality, a localised form of patron-client relationships — updated for an American-style democratic context in the Philippines — that was common throughout Southeast Asia. The Philippine informal dweller and politician established “an effective, if fragile symbiotic alliance” in which each one made use of the other for practical self-interest. In the history of rehousing in post-war Philippines, it was not surprising that “the intervening politician is an omnipresent factor in the squatter problem” (Stone, 1973, pp. 67–8, 76, 115). The Philippine state’s inconsistent policy towards informal dwellers has sometimes been attributed to sympathy for the poor, but the real reason is far more politically rooted.

In 1947, the Philippine president received a petition from informal dwellers who had built houses on vacant land, whereupon he agreed not to evict them but to accept their occupation (Juppenlatz, 1970, p. 90). In 1956, the government went further by legally recognising the rights of families who had built unauthorised houses on a strip of foreshore land in Manila. Underlying these seemingly benevolent acts, however, was the plain fact that the political leadership in the Philippines was not so much unwilling to forcibly remove informal dwellers as unable to do so. This was deeply ingrained in the contractual nature of politics and administration in the country. Provincial governors in the Philippines usually found themselves surrounded by patronage-seeking job-hunters who viewed their work as not serving the public interest but only their own and those of their clients.

The character of patronage politics in the Philippines is also reflected in a notable lack of suitable legislation, which would provide for a national public housing programme. Pre-war zoning and building regulations remained in place after the war, even though they hampered coordinated housing development at the local level. Opposition and political pressure from municipal politicians had rendered it difficult for the state to update the local bylaws in line with national housing plans (Ooi, 2005, p. 61).

Another feature of housing policy in post-war Philippines was the sheer variety of public bodies involved. In 1950, the National Planning Commission was established, replacing three autonomous government bodies that had existed before it. The commission had the power to coordinate the urban and economic development of the country but found much of its efforts in the early 1950s strongly opposed by the
public. In addition, as in the case of Thailand, four different public housing agencies existed and competed with one another in the decade, duplicating work and making administrative errors: the People’s Homesite and Housing Corporation, the National Land Settlement Administration, the Rural Progress Administration and the Ministry of Labour. Not surprisingly, despite the large number of agencies nominally involved,
there were usually inadequate public funds for a subsidised housing programme, which would meet the great demand (Abrams, 1966, pp. 81–4). The 1951 United Nations Mission of Experts lamented that “a well-defined national planning policy” was necessary for the Philippines (United Nations Mission of Experts, 1951, pp. 148, 150–1, 153, 162).

Aprodicio Laquian’s insightful study of “administrative politics” in post-war metropolitan Manila throws light on the difficulty of formulating a coordinated public housing programme in the Philippines. As he argues, there existed a constant tension in Philippine politics between democracy and efficiency throughout the country’s colonial and post-colonial history. Most politicians in the Philippines were professional politicians whose overriding aim was to obtain a high political position and much less so to reform the system. This meant that, in Manila, both national and local politicians were bound together in a mutually beneficial relationship: both needed each other to win elections (Laquian, 1966, p. 118). They also aligned themselves with informal dwellers in pragmatic bids to win votes, while the residents themselves made use of such patronage to resist eviction and win from the state lawful tenure of their occupation (Laquian, 1966, p. 54). In addition, informal dwellers often further strengthened their own position by joining non-governmental organisations advocating their interests. In 1960, in one informal settlement called Fabie Estate, more than 30% of the respondents were members of one of more than 30 civic organisations working in the area (as cited in Laquian 1966, p. 55).

However, despite their social and political influence, the net effect of the collaboration between informal dwellers and politicians was not always positive: it usually led the latter to embark on small-scale, politically visible and labour-intensive projects, such as repair of wooden structures and road work, in order to amass popular support. Such work, however, was usually of a low quality and quickly abandoned when the funds inevitably ran out. Urban development in Manila, then, was politically rational — that is, for the professional politicians. But it was non-rational in the administrative sense because the basic issue of informal housing was never decisively tackled. Senior administrators themselves wielded much political influence and periodically intervened in Philippine politics, backing or undermining developmental projects that served their narrow interests (Laquian, 1966, pp. 132, 140, 144). In other words, the pragmatic nature of “administrative politics” and the contractual relationship between national and local politicians and informal communities forged a political structure that made it impossible for the Philippine state to be truly high modernist.

Aprodicio Laquian analyses the infamous resettlement of informal dwellers in Intramuros in December 1963: A presidential committee, which had formed in April to investigate “the squatter problem” and seek solutions on a national scale, had recommended the resettlement. The original plan was to physically prepare the new sites well in advance, organise the relocatees in self-help groups and provide them with housing lots for agriculture and pig- and poultry-rearing. However, the mayor of Manila decided to bring forward the operation. On 2 December, he prematurely ejected the dwellers on the reasoning that they were so deeply retrenched in the area that no official programme to prepare the site would serve any purpose. More likely, though, he had acted quickly to forestall organised opposition from the residents (Juppenlatz, 1970, pp. 124, 128).

He sent in ”wrecker crews”, which summarily dismantled more than 2,800 informal houses and relocated 4,500 families to a resettlement area in Sapang Palay, a barren, hilly estate in Bulacan province about 35 kilometres from Manila. On the third day of the eviction, the authorities piled up the demolished debris of the settlement and burned it. The eviction operation then spread to North Harbour, Ayala Bridge and Ermita, from which a total of 15,000 families were removed. This swelled the population of Sapang Palay from an initial 600 to more than 3,000 families.

However, with the rapid surge of families into the estate, public amenities quickly became inadequate, while many of the residents lost their jobs, having been separated far from their workplaces (Laquian, 1966, pp. 151–69). A local newspaper charged that the Sapang Palay project was completely unplanned, and that the evicted families were simply “dumped anywhere around the community and left alone to themselves to build barong-barong” (Dwyer, 1976, p. 131).

The administration of the Sapang Palay project, as Aprodicio Laquian explains, underlines the professional character of public policy in the Philippines. A total of 29 agencies, both public and otherwise, pledged assistance to the relocated dwellers, including the People’s Homesite and Housing Corporation, the chief public housing agency which built rows of barrack-like wooden houses with corrugated iron roofs, partitioned into small rooms intended for one family each — not significantly different from the informal housing in Intramuros; the Social Welfare Administration, which distributed relief goods; the Emergency Employment Administration, which hired workers to improve the roads; and the National Waterworks and Sewerage Authority, which dug the wells. The administration was uncoordinated and even plainly competitive, with the agencies involved only in a “token manner” and only briefly giving “a try” in tackling the challenge.

A month before the clearance of Intramuros, the Philippine president, Diosdado Macapagal, established the Office of Presidential Assistant on Housing to coordinate a national housing programme, but at the time of the eviction, it did not have the staff or resources to assist substantially in the Sapang Palay project (Laquian, 1966, pp. 151–69). The president also issued an executive order to form a national Squatter Resettlement Agency but its work was also predictably hampered by a serious shortage of funds (Dwyer, 1976, p. 132). As Aprodicio Laquian observed, the large number of agencies which were haphazardly and ineffectually involved in the assistance programme were merely participating in the customary “administrative politics” in the Philippines: they were there to visibly demonstrate their concern for the rehoused families in order to find political favour with President Macapagal, who had indicated his commitment to helping the poor by launching a national housing programme. Much of the agencies’ interventions involved little more than political hot air framed in seductive language, such as the idea of an “agro-industrial” estate (Laquian, 1966, pp. 151–69).

It was only in March 1964 that the government set up a steering committee to plan the development of Sapang Palay into an “agro-industrial” estate and the provision of employment for the new residents. While it met to discuss and eventually produce a draft master plan and physical development plan, a typhoon destroyed about 90% of the makeshift dwellings in Sapang Palay in June (Laquian, 1966, pp. 151–69). By the end of 1965, about 600 out of the 3,415 families in the settlement had left. In the following year, the government established a training centre in Sapang Palay to study the problems of resettlement and rehabilitation for the informal dwellers. Nevertheless, the United Nations continued to view Sapang Palay as a project with much promise (United Nations, 1970, as cited in Desai & Pillai, 1970, pp. 240–1). Morris Juppenlatz, who was involved in the relocation operation, regarded it as one of its main benefits in dispersing the criminal elements in the Oxo and Sigue Sigue gangs. He added that he was pleased no one had died from illness and exposure due to the physical demands of the move (Juppenlatz, 1970, pp. 128, 135).

As a result of patronage and professional politics in the Philippines, rehousing struggles have persisted to the present day. Although the government was successful in evicting the residents of Intramuros in 1963, in other cases, organised residents effectively opposed them. In Davao, conversely, the informal dwellers had strong political connections; they were able to obtain legal rights for their housing, which was consequently of superior quality to those elsewhere in the Philippines and in Southeast Asia (McGee, 1970, p. 125; 1967, pp. 158–9). Between 1951 and 1955, the authorities simply cleared 1,333 families living in Bago Bantay, eight kilometres from the centre of Manila, and delivered them to their new site, without helping them to build their new homes.

At the site, there was also no water supply, road, drainage and other essential social amenities. By 1955, fewer than half of the families living there were gainfully employed, and were mainly engaged in causal labour. A decade after the initial rehousing, most of the original relocatees had left the settlement. In 1953, the government sold the rights to 652 lots in Bagong Pag-asa to informal dwellers, only to find out afterwards that many of them had simply returned to their previous informal housing in Manila, enriched by the transactions (Juppenlatz, 1970, pp. 92–3; Laquian, 1969, pp. 9–10). By 1970, due to inadequate political support for public housing, 10% of the population in Manila and 30% of those in Jolo City, Luzan, Visayas and Mindanao were still living in slums and informal settlements (United Nations, 1971, p. 49).

In post-war Malaya, the clearance of informal housing areas also proved tremendously difficult due to the half-hearted approach of both the colonial and post-colonial states. Tim Harper has aptly pointed to the role of colonialism as an important “social force” seeking to forge a new society (Harper, 1998, p. 8). On the surface, the administration in Malaya adopted a housing strategy similar to that in Singapore. In 1951, a Federal Housing Trust was created but had to share its authority with a number of other agencies at federal, state and local levels. These included the Federal Land Development Authority, which built rural housing; the Urban Development Authority; the Malaysian Building Society Berhad; and the Government Officers’ Housing Company (Karnjanaprakorn et al., 1979, p. 68).

Although the aided self-help policy was an integral part of the massive resettlement programme for Chinese villagers in the rural areas, there was no centralised housing and planning authority in the urban areas, while the country’s town planning office was small and purely advisory in character (United Nations Mission of Experts, 1951, pp. 99–100). In 1951, the colonial authorities began removing informal dwellers in Kuala Lumpur to Petaling Jaya, seven miles southwest of the capital, which was intended to become a self-contained satellite town with its own social amenities and employment providers. As in Intramuros, the Petaling Jaya housing was poorly built, while there was also inadequate employment for the new residents. Many of them continued to travel to Kuala Lumpur for work, defeating the basic idea of a satellite town. Three years later, the authorities conceded its failure in resettling informal dwellers and began to replan the satellite town as a centre for middle-class, rather than working-class, housing (McGee, 1967, p. 153; Lam, 1979, p. 281). By the mid-1960s, Petaling Jaya had become a place of fairly high living standards (McGee
and McTaggart, 1967, p. 30).

The influence of patron-client relationships produced a characteristically Southeast Asian housing policy that both reflected and served the visible role of the post-colonial state as the patron of its subjects. On public housing efforts in post-war Kuala Lumpur, Manila and elsewhere in the region, T. G. McGee and others have observed that “national prestige, more than national concern for the social welfare of squatters, has been the most active force leading to their shift in these two cases”, but this, in the final analysis, did not transform the housing situation (McGee, 1967, pp. 169–70; Keynes & Burcroff, 1976, p. 69). The Malaysian state evidently possessed such a philosophy in the literal use of public housing as “prestige projects”. In the mid-1960s, the Malaysian government complained that informal housing was not only illegal, a source of crime and a fire hazard, but also “tarnishes [Kuala Lumpur’s] image both at home and abroad in that the presence of squatter huts is not in keeping with the orderly development of the national capital”. But housing driven by such a pursuit of prestige aesthetics was no substitute for the political determination to create visually legible housing estates, characteristic of the high modernist mind. The Malaysian efforts to rehouse informal dwellers, as in the cases of the Philippines and Thailand, were frequently frustrated by political interference and patron-client relationships, and usually met with failure (Malaysia Kementerian Penerangan, 1971, pp. 6, 8).

By the end of the 1960s, the outcomes of the diverse informal housing clearances and public housing developments in Southeast Asia and Hong Kong were becoming clear. The percentage of the country’s population living in urban slums and informal settlements in the region had fallen appreciably in Hong Kong (8%) and Singapore (15%). But it remained high elsewhere: it was 33% in Kuala Lumpur and Manila, 25% in Jakarta and 20% in Bangkok-Thonburi. Clearly, it was the physically small city-states in the region that were fast becoming the exceptions to the norm in the history of rehousing in the post-war period (Laquian, 1979, p. 53).

The Social Politics Of Fires And Emergency Public Housing

Finally, fire was yet another important dimension in the official campaign against informal settlements in post-war Southeast Asia and Hong Kong. In Singapore and Hong Kong, large fires occurred periodically in informal housing areas in the 1950s, dishousing thousands of families. In Manila, more than 70% of the fires also occurred in settlements of informal housing, although there was little follow-up in terms of public housing efforts (McGee, 1970, p. 126). The fires are important for understanding the social history of informal settlements and the relationship between urban planners and residents of such housing in several ways. For one, as some scholars have observed, urban disasters such as typhoons and infernos ought to be understood as a “trigger” to deeply rooted demographic, social, economic and political pressures (Blaikie et al., 1994, pp. 22–66; Pelling, 2003, pp. 16, 19). The failure of municipal administrations to deal with the fire threat should not be viewed as merely an administrative or technological issue but underlines the ambivalent relationship between the state and the semi-autonomous residents of informal housing.

At the same time, the fire hazard also reveals the social dynamism and community organisation of informal dwellers. The organisation of volunteer fire-fighting brigades for the prevention of fire has already been mentioned. Another aspect of community cohesion is the resilience shown by many fire victims in the aftermath of conflagrations. In 1968, within two weeks after a slum in Bangkok was destroyed by fire, the fire victims themselves rebuilt it, having nowhere else to go. Their social web of mutual self-help and strong patron-client relationships enabled the act of rebuilding the fire site — one that is commonplace among informal communities. The reconstruction of the Bangkok slum was precipitated by an informal community leader, who, in defiance of official notices, rebuilt his own house on the fire site, whereupon the other fire victims quickly followed suit (Rabibhadana, 1975, pp. 67, 275). Such tenacity in the revival of informal settlements after a fiery disaster constituted a major challenge to the planning and development efforts of the state.

The most important issue surrounding the fires is that, by creating a state of emergency, they represented important opportunities for social transformation. From the point of view of the state and mainstream society, an inferno appears to be a non-political emergency that demands robust intervention by the state on behalf of the fire victims (Clancey, 2004, p. 45). This of course assumes, contrary to what has been discussed, that fire victims are incapable of rebuilding their lives after a disaster. The fires provide the state with both great practical expediency, in clearing the unauthorised housing en masse, and the moral mandate to provide alternative housing for the fire victims. In a single moment, a blaze removes the unauthorised self-built houses that have enabled the semi-autonomous community to contest the hegemony of the state at the margins of the city.

The 1961 Bukit Ho Swee fire, a pivotal event in the history of Singapore housing, is an excellent example of the transformation of a city-state and its “squatters” into socialised citizens. The fire destroyed a major informal settlement just outside the inner city and rendered nearly 16,000 people (see below) homeless, but enabled the newly installed PAP government to build an emergency public housing estate, eventually totalling some 70,000 flats, over the ashes of the fire site within a year. As a historical event, the inferno was crucial to the PAP in giving its housing planners both an initial site for an expanded public housing programme which would eventually clear the slums and informal settlements at the margins of the city, and the confidence to robustly carry out the project (Loh, 2009d).

Interestingly, Singapore’s experience can be compared with that of Hong Kong. On Christmas Day 1953, the Shek Kip Mei inferno rendered 50,000 people homeless and, according to official mythology, kick-started the British emergency public housing programme in the 1950s. Subsequently, as the official narrative states, the colonial regime in Hong Kong established a Department of Resettlement to consider matters of rehousing in the colony and commenced the building of six- or seven-storey “H”-shaped emergency housing with communal amenities. A decade later, 605,000 former informal dwellers had been successfully resettled in such housing. The “H”-blocks of emergency flats were severely overcrowded, accommodating up to 2,000 people per acre, but the British government justified the resettlement by explaining that they were “emergency housing” which were necessary to cope with the threat of fire. The British also pointed out that the emergency housing was, supposedly, “sanitary, weather-proof, and fire-proof” and that, in characteristic high modernist fashion, it should be judged by “what it replaced rather than by arbitrary standards of what is desirable” (Dwyer, 1976, p. 138). The Shek Kip Mei fire shares the same elevated historical role as the Bukit Ho Swee conflagration in Singapore, which, coincidentally, also occurred on a public holiday — Hari Raya Haji, in May.

However, Alan Smart, from examining the declassified colonial archives, has deconstructed the myth and demonstrated that it was not merely Shek Kip Mei, but an entire slew of conflagrations in informal settlements in the 1950s which brought about the birth and development of the British regime’s public housing programme in Hong Kong. He has argued convincingly that the early beginnings of the programme lay in the Kowloon calamity of 1950, while it took a full year after Shek Kip Mei, after a major fire at Lei Cheng Uk in October 1954, that the policy to resettle the fire victims in emergency public housing was substantially expanded. For informal housing built on rooftops of shophouses, it was only in 1956 that the British government decided to prohibit such new structures from being erected (Report of the working party, 1963, p. 5). Nevertheless, while no singular blaze alone had that impact, the Hong Kong infernos in the 1950s did collectively create a continued state of emergency, which gave the British authorities the moral mandate to launch a full-scale public housing programme. As Smart observes, building emergency public housing in Hong Kong was “a learning process punctuated by a continuing series of crises” (Smart, 2006, p. 189).

In the Singapore case, the pattern of emergency public housing development was broadly similar. The first great post-war fire at Kampong Bugis in August 1951 was met with colonial indifference. But following two more fiery disasters in the vicinity in 1953, a modest number of emergency public housing units, located near the fire sites, were built to accommodate the fire victims, while the fire sites themselves were gazetted for low-cost public housing. In 1958, following another major fire at Kampong Koo Chye, the SIT built about 200 subsidised emergency public housing units for sale. The British-built emergency housing was not completely successful due to their high costs and unpopular locations, leading many fire victims to return to live in informal housing in the vicinity of their former wooden homes. However, the experience and practical lessons the British emergency programme gave the PAP government in dealing with the Bukit Ho Swee disaster in 1961 was vital. What distinguished Singapore and Hong Kong then was that while the Hong Kong regime dealing with the crises was a colonial government, in the case of Singapore, the outbreak of an unprecedented fire less than two years after the PAP government assumed the reins of power enabled the self-governing state to embark on a full public housing programme. The emergency housing programme provided the PAP with both the moral mandate to intervene in the lives of the citizenry and the opportunity to launch a housing programme to restore social order to the margins of the city-state (Loh, 2009d).

Castells, Goh and Kwok have also argued that the success of the Hong Kong public housing programme — which they termed the “Shek Kip Mei syndrome” — was influential in persuading the PAP government to substantially enlarge the British project in Singapore after 1959. However, they provided no archival evidence for the view, which disagrees with the previously discussed perspective, that the HDB was more strongly influenced by American housing ideas. In Hong Kong, the creation of a six-mile long belt of densely built wooden housing had made further development of land in Kowloon virtually impossible by 1954. The emergency public housing built after Shek Kip Mei solved this problem to a large extent: the subsidised housing helped to keep labour costs low, enabled the establishment of manufacturing industries over the burned-out sites of the informal housing, and encouraged mass consumption among the population. In the view of Castells and his colleagues, the Shek Kip Mei model of emergency public housing development in both Hong Kong and Singapore was not merely a means of providing social welfare for the unfortunate fire victims but also an important form of state intervention to promote planned economic development, social engineering and the overall hegemony of the state (Castells et al., 1990, pp. 1, 333). Elsewhere in Southeast Asia, states responded to fires and typhoons with much less ambition and according to their social goals. In Bangkok, the burning down of slums and informal settlements was simply a means by which the state could implement its limited “prestige projects” (Korff, 1986, p. 173).

Yet, at the same time, it should be noted that a social history of informal housing fires demands to be studied. Many of the fire victims themselves did not view the blazes to be non-political. Sometimes, they blamed the state for failing to bring the health hazard under control. But more frequently, they simply charged the authorities for having started the fire to evict them. In Singapore, there were numerous angry rumours in the aftermath of informal housing fires — particularly after the Bukit Ho Swee disaster — that they had been started by the government in a bid to evict the residents and develop the land. These rumours of arson were useful for various political parties that sought to win mass support by speaking on behalf of the fire victims and placing blame on the regime. Opposition parties such as the Barisan Sosialis did their best to ensure that arson remained in the popular imagination, by propagating the alleged links between fire and eviction and framing the fires as part of the government’s “underhand” and “oppressive” politics (Singapore Legislative Assembly Debates, 1964, p. 639).

I have argued elsewhere that such rumours continue to function socially as a powerful “counter-myth” which critiques, albeit in the private sphere, the claims and reality of high modernist development in contemporary Singapore (Loh, 2009b). In the fires in Hong Kong in the 1950s, rumours of government-inspired arson, too, were widespread, indicating how infernos in unauthorised housing settlements had become deeply politicised issues in the public mind (Smart, 2006, pp. 134–41). The persistence of these rumours over a long period of time (in the Singapore case, up to the present day) highlights their importance for studying the relationship between the state and the informal community. Whether the rumours are true is a separate matter, which is difficult to properly establish, but what is more important here, in the framework of social history, is that they existed and were circulated, and that the fire victims believed them. More archival and ethnographic work into the rumours and social memory of the fires needs to be done.

Conclusion

The history of informal housing in Southeast Asia after World War II was multifaceted. Only the region’s citystates successfully adopted policies of social governance that approached the high modernist model. The Singapore and Hong Kong states succeeded in overriding organised opposition to replace superficially

“messy” informal settlements with visually legible modern housing estates. Both governments possessed the will to transform their subjects into model citizens towards achieving broader developmentalist goals. Both obtained effective political hegemony — one was a non-representative colonial state which did not have to contend with democratic politics, while the other was an elected post-colonial government which nevertheless tolerated little opposition and dominated domestic politics. Both also launched their public housing programmes in the context of major states of emergency occasioned by the outbreaks of great fires in settlements of informal housing.

Elsewhere in Southeast Asia, both the colonial and post-colonial governments shared much in common with the Singapore and Hong Kong states in their views towards housing: all feared the informal dwellers as liminal communities, discursively criminalised their housing and social life, emphasised economic development and social stability, and had the opportunity to transform informal housing sites in the aftermath of destructive fires and typhoons. Southeast Asian states also received and accepted in part the advice of Western housing and planning consultants on the social and political danger posed by informal housing expansion and the need to subdue them in order to move towards building modern cities of the future, although individual states viewed the two options of public housing and aided self-help housing with varying degrees of enthusiasm. In the British colonies of Singapore, Hong Kong and Malaya, the colonial state in particular supported robust rehousing and public housing measures, and such an approach was effectively adopted and expanded by the PAP government in Singapore, and by Hong Kong.

The post-colonial Southeast Asian state was typically the patron of the citizenry, including the informal communities, and failed to obtain the requisite political hegemony to push through unpopular housing reforms. The Philippine state was both too democratic and too traditionally reliant on the support of its clients. Informal dwellers, local politicians and senior administrators held too much political influence for the state to carry out a sustained campaign of eviction and resettlement. By contrast, the Thai, Indonesian and Malaysian states were not genuinely democratic. But they were also too reliant on patronage politics for political legitimacy to ignore the importance of votes found in informal settlements at the margins of the city. Added to the constant rhythm of patronage politics in these countries in the long run were political shifts that occasionally destabilised the polity in Thailand and the Philippines. The result of these complicated tangles of state-society relations was that most Southeast Asian states usually embarked on limited, short-term and visible “prestige projects”. At the same time, these efforts merely maintained the societal status quo, rather than revamping it. The region’s states floundered in tackling the informal housing issue in characteristic ways: forming numerous public agencies to disguise a lack of political authority and commitment, without being able to coordinate these agencies; and lacking comprehensive planning, sufficient resources and proper legislation and bylaws.

Is there, then, a “Southeast Asian” experience in post-war informal housing development? Other than in Singapore, a form of patronage politics that had its roots in the pre-colonial period undermined the other post-colonial states in the region. Continuity, then, appears to be an important theme in the region’s history of informal housing. The PAP in Singapore was the sole exception, where a high modernist bureaucracy state was established and wielded great power. The influence of patronage produced another aspect of continuity in the housing policies of both the late colonial and early post-colonial states after the war: the post-colonial governments either learnt from the philosophy, methods and practical experience of the colonial regimes, as in Singapore, or continued to be limited or frustrated in resettling informal dwellers.

The other major similarity in Southeast Asia’s housing experience lies in social history. The region shared common historical developments in informal housing growth after World War II, which greatly aroused the anxiety of the state. The movement of low-income families, because of both natural increase, and transnational and rural-urban migration, was a common feature of demographic and social change in postwar Southeast Asia and Hong Kong. Driven by the pragmatic need to house their expanding families in suitable accommodation that would still remain close enough to their workplaces, the new urban migrants settled into self-built temporary housing at the margins of the city on idle land that lay initially beyond the gaze of the state. In other words, such a “quiet encroachment of the ordinary” in post-war Southeast Asia has created a shared history of demographic and social change, which challenged the authority of the state and has survived into the present.

The communities that emerged on such locations were fairly cohesive and dynamic and were able to deal collectively, although not always successfully, with the common threats they faced — fire, crime and eviction. Contributing to a part of this community cohesion were criminal gangs, which recruited from the settlements’ youths and which drew the ire of the state. In other ways, however, informal communities were integrated into the political and economic structures of the state. They were closely tied to the formal economy through either urban wage work or as semi-rural workers in the local sector. The communities also sought the support, variously, of local and national politicians, non-governmental civic and advocacy organisations and leftwing and communist organisations to defend their interests.

What Southeast Asia and Hong Kong shared, then, was the emergence of communities that were both semi-autonomous and semi-independent of the state in the post-war period. What was also common, as a result, was that the states in the region responded by criminalising these dwellers as “squatters” whose alleged inertia and illegality could spread and corrupt the entire city and state, like a contagious disease. In extreme cases, they were even feared as constituting a revolutionary mass. This highlights the post-war Southeast Asian state’s anxiety towards semi-autonomous communities living at the physical and social margins of the city. The fear was shared by both the late colonial and post-colonial states in the region but none, except Singapore and Hong Kong, managed to find the high modernist power to transform semi-autonomous dwellers into colonial subjects or model citizens.

 The author wishes to acknowledge the contribution of Professor Alan Smart, Department of Anthropology University of Calgary, in reviewing the paper.