Land use for housing in Singapore occupies about twelve percent of the island's total land area.

A primary characteristic of the Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA) plan is the relationship between the present Central Business District (CBD) in the South-Central region, and the other four regions.

Each of these four regions will have a Regional Centre as its largest settlement. Each Regional Centre will be about fifteen times the size of a present-day Housing Development Board (HDB) town centre. They will each serve 800,000 people, and are second in size and function only to the CBD.

The purpose of such a heirarchy is twofold.

First, it is hoped to relieve pressure on the services provided currently only by the CBD.

Second, it is envisaged that sources of employment will be brought closer to people's homes.

Public housing in Singapore has undergone several phases.

Post-war public housing in Singapore initially came under the purview of the Singapore Improvement Trust (SIT), which was formed in 1927. Most of the SIT's pre-war activities consisted of efforts to improve the City area by laying out and improving roads and open spaces, condemning unsuitable buildings, opening up back-lanes to improve sanitation and ventilation, and developing quarters for resettled persons. Increasing the new housing stock was not one of its priorities.

As a result, living conditions in Chinatown particularly were appalling. Not only was the housing stock physically deteriorating, but the two- and three-storey shophouses had, since the mid-nineteenth century, been partitioned and re-partitioned into ever smaller cubicles. These cubicles averaged about ten square metres in size, and with one or more families packed into this space, people only had just enough room to lie down and store their possessions in a small chest.

When it was impossible to partition the cubicles any further, people erected make-shift structures in air-wells, back-lanes and even on rooftops.

Some were forced to move further away, to the fringes of the Core area, where tightly packed squatter settlements were springing up. The latter had a total population of at least a hundred thousand immediately post-war.

The report of the Housing Committee of 1947 revealed that about a third of the island's population of approximately one million was living in only about four hundred hectares. Remember, this was before the days of high-rise housing!

Furthermore, the report's description of the housing conditions of the squatters could be equally applicable to the situation facing squatter settlements in many parts of the Third World even today:

"These people live in huts made of attap, old boxes, rusty corrugated iron, with no sanitation, water or any elementary health requirements. It is a literal and physical impossibility to eject these people, as they have nowhere else to go, and cannot be crammed back into the slums from which they have escaped. In the meantime they constitute a menace to the health not only to their own localities but to the whole city, in the event of an outbreak of disease."

Part 2: HDB
Part 3: Upgrading
Part 4: The Future

Reproduced with permission from the site formerly known as 'No Place Like Home', © Kenneth Y T Lim 1995-9