Hawker centres, the outdoor food courts where locals gather for cheap evening meals, are the heart of most Singapore neighbourhoods. There is one close to my house, where families sit chatting on brightly coloured benches as dusk falls, ordering from dozens of stalls serving fresh local favourites, from chicken rice to Hokkien prawn noodles. The nightly scene provides a pleasing community vision in all respects bar one — the centre is ringed with ominous-looking concrete residential tower blocks.
The ubiquity of high-rise living in this small island nation came to mind in the aftermath of London’s Grenfell Tower tragedy last month. Beyond the immediate horror, the Grenfell blaze reinforced worries about tenement living, and led to calls that new blocks in the UK be scrapped. The idea of the residential tower as an emblem of social failure is deeply rooted, not just in Britain, but across the west; “an environment built, not for man, but for man’s absence”, as JG Ballard put it, in his 1975 dystopian novel High-Rise.
Yet Singapore, now mentioned from time to time as a possible post-Brexit template for the UK, provides a hearteningly different vision, in which tower blocks are not just normal, but popular, too. Indeed, viewed from Europe or North America, the story of public housing in Singapore can seem almost miraculous.