IN-PERSON Manchester Livable Cities

Abstract

Singapore’s public housing system is globally celebrated as a model of efficient urban governance, offering near-universal homeownership and high-density living under state planning. Yet this success narrative often occludes the complex spatiotemporal logics through which inequality is managed and political legitimacy is produced. This paper proposes a critical reading of public housing in Singapore as a dispositif of spatiotemporal governmentality, shaped by postcolonial strategies of ordering populations, deferring unrest, and scripting futures. Through close engagement with You Yenn Teo’s ethnography alongside my own theoretical framing, the paper introduces two interlinked concepts: ephemerality and micro-historicity. Ephemerality names the fleeting, contingent appearances of state-managed inequality – moments of friction, fatigue, or suspended aspiration that disrupt the smooth temporal narratives of meritocratic mobility. Micro-historicity, by contrast, attends to the embeddedness of housing in accumulated, unresolved pasts: the quasi-colonial legacies, developmentalist recalibrations, and affective infrastructures that linger in domestic routines and urban spatial memory. Together, these concepts enable a reading of Singapore’s public housing estates not simply as stable infrastructure, but as spatiotemporal archives – where the residues of history and the projections of governance coexist in lived contradiction. This approach reframes the city-state’s urbanism not as a ‘best practice’ to be emulated, but as a situated épistème of Asia’s postcoloniality, in which housing becomes a medium for negotiating time, space, and state power. In doing so, the paper challenges dominant discourses of urban livability and offers an alternative theorisation grounded in Asia’s time-space condition of postcoloniality.