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A modern city-state, Rising from ashes
Squatters into Citizens: The 1961 Bukit Ho Swee Fire and the Making of Modern Singapore, Loh Kah Seng, NUS Press (2013), 312 pages
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Squatters into Citizens: The 1961 Bukit Ho Swee Fire and the Making of Modern Singapore, Loh Kah Seng, NUS Press (2013), 312 pages.
Anyone who visits Singapore from Jakarta is struck by the contrast between the cities.
While Singapore is well-administered, clean and features superb public transportation; residents of Jakarta can only shrug as they ponder what makes such a model urban city.
It might come as a surprise to realize that until recently, the differences between Singapore and Jakarta were not so stark.
As visitors transit from ultra-modern Changi airport to look at well-maintained, uncongested highways, they look up at skyscrapers and still-functional 1960s and 1970s public housing projects ' and assume it was ever thus in Singapore.
However, as Loh Kah Seng's Squatters into Citizens shows the reader, until the 1960s, Singapore was a noisy, overcrowded, stinking seaport just like Jakarta.
In teeming slums and urban kampungs, tens of thousands of families lived cheek-by-jowl in ramshackle homes, where fire, crime and even serious inter-communal violence were commonplace threats.
Squatters into Citizens offers an alternative to the official narrative, which holds that Singapore rose from fishing village to First-World metropolis on the back of an industrious, civic-minded population who worked in harmonious cooperation with a benevolent government to build the modern city we see today.
Central to Seng's narrative is an examination of the events surrounding the fire that swept through the Bukit Ho Swee kampung in May 1961 and the subsequent rehousing of residents in the first big project carried out by Singapore's Housing Development Board (HDB), established the previous year by then-prime minister Lee Kuan Yew.
The book is based on Seng's oral interviews with former residents of the kampung ' his parents, who were moved into an HDB apartment after the conflagration, were his first subjects ' as well as archives to write a history of urban development in Singapore covering the period before and after the fire.
The first few chapters have an academic tone, exploring housing policy in Singapore in the colonial era and urbanization in the decade after World War II.
Seng then deftly moves on to describes the fire and its aftermath, drawing on first-hand testimony from former residents and reports in the media and official documents.
Events are described with clarity and combined with over 50 photographs, giving the reader a sense of the shock and bewilderment of residents suddenly made homeless ' and also of the government's impressive relief-and-rehousing program that swung into operation almost immediately.
Most interesting is Seng's discussion of the competing versions of the history of the fire.
First is the official story, which frames the fire as a 'blessing in disguise' that would prompt Singapore, phoenix-like, to emerge as a modern state from the ashes of the slums.
Second is a nostalgic view, indulged in by older residents, who view their kampung as an idyllic community of unlocked doors and ever-helpful neighbors ' a rose-tinted narrative that competes with, but does not challenge, the official narrative.
The third view that Seng describes, however, is the most contentious: That the fire was allegedly and deliberately set to advance the modernization agenda of the government, led, then as now, by the People's Action Party, although in 1961, the PAP led Singapore as part of Malaya.
Seng is dismissive of this version. For him, the important element is not the veracity of whispers of arson ' but that such rumors are still widely believed. The truth is that the citizens of Singapore are more cynical about their government than might be assumed, although others demur.
Seng describes this in the book, relating how he felt that he was pursuing the 'wrong' topic, at least in academic circles. Further, while interviewing older residents about the fire, he frequently encountered anger and wariness on his choice of topic.
In any event, Seng has borne witness to his subjects, weaving an admirable story of people pulling themselves up by their bootstraps and doing well ' even though others might appear unhappy at Seng's choosing to wash the family's linen in such a public way.
Squatters into Citizens offers a fascinating perspective on life in our ultra-modern neighboring country ' just the day before yesterday.
