week 12: heterotopia

1. state responses

2. heterotopia = making life work as best as one can

• Hetero  multiple
• Topia  utopia

1
1. state responses
-remaking space: never people-centred
material calculations, GDP growth
social implications
educational/life stress
depression, mental illness, suicides etc.
elderly depression: 5.5% (2006), 17.1% (2016) – Mythily Subramaniam (2016), “Prevalence of
Depression among Older Adults – Results from the Well-being of the Singapore Elderly Study”
2004: five-day-week, promoting family life
prolonging usual workday
Economy strategy  very revolutionary (boost export oriented)  total change
Never people oriented
Gov always look at economic growth and GDP but never the social impact
New economic strategy led to even more social implication  educational stress  so
high nowadays it felt like child self worth lies only around grades
General life stress (ppl wake up before sun rise)
Mental diseases in SG has become an epidemic
Elderly subjected to depression cuz they are fking lonely
2
-political backlash in early 2010s
bigger economic pie, greater rich-poor gap
ever-increasing population density
-i. revising its stance on welfare
esp: elderly poverty, wage depression and inequality
Pioneer Generation package (2014) [cuz 2015 is another election] , Merdeka Generation
package (2019)

A few more new blocks are built even tho place dense ady and getting higher
and higher
Pioneer generation package  subsidised price for elderly medical
Gov need to fork out reserve from national budget ($8 billion each package)
Timing for launching all these packages is really timed precisely for the ruling
party
Political backlash could be due to the increasing stress

3
Workfare Income Supplement (WIS), from 2007, enhanced in 2017
also: Workfare Training Support (WTS)
Progressive Wage Model (since 2015), wage correction
more generally: ComCare – for low-income individuals and families; from 2005, enhanced in
2014
NB: timing before election; see Garry Rodan (2016), “Capitalism, Inequality and Ideology in
Singapore”

 2015 election: 69.9% win

WIS  if their income is <$2000 gov will provide some fund into their bank
depends on ur household (eg $200 every month if you have 2 children)
WTS  go bck to school for retraining
PWM  minimum wage of at least $1000
ComCare  $600 per capita , you can ask for supplementary (cash pay-out or
CPF) [started as a one off event but it became a permanent welfare]

4
-ii. ameliorating relations
stop massive numbers of PR, turning to grant new citizenship instead
i.e. no more “Singaporean” VS “foreigner” controversy

https://www.straitstimes.com/politics/parliament-no-major-changes-expected-to-immigrati
on-policy-josephine-teo
(2018-03-01)
since 2012: >22,000 new citizens/year; PR: ~530,000
continued till 2030, 6.9M target

• When introduce so many PR  means they can buy HDB flat as well 
competition in housing market and living space

5
2011 realise too many PR will translate lower votes to PAP 
just gradually introduce of granting PR  became very
regulated
6
 “… it is ultimately up to us how big-hearted how we want to be. We may be a small island,
we cannot be small-minded. We cannot just be a prosperous and successful country. We
have also got to be a caring, a generous, a decent people; people who are gracious and
warm towards one another as well as towards others and that is the best way to ensure that
tomorrow Singapore will have a bigger heart…
There is one particularly difficult area where we need to be big hearted and that is in
relations between Singaporeans and non-Singaporeans…
Singaporeans have to show a generosity of spirit to one another, including to the new
arrivals. And the new arrivals also have to embrace our values, commit themselves to
Singapore and integrate into our community.”
http://www.pmo.gov.sg/newsroom/prime-minister-lee-hsien-loongs-national-day-rally-2012
-speech-english

grassroots activities https://www.pa.gov.sg/our-programmes/community-integration

“Love Your Neighbour” campaign (from 2013)

 social engineering, version 2010s; no stopping the economic engine

Without promoting the population to grow 6.9M they cannot achieve the
economic growth they planned in 2013
7
2. heterotopia = making life work as best as one can
-“heterotopia”/ “micro-utopias”
esp HDB dwellers
“The architect who designs, the planner who draws up masterplans, see their
'objects’, buildings and neighbourhoods, from on high and from afar…. They pass
from the 'lived' to the abstract in order to project that abstraction onto the level of
the lived.” -- Henri Lefebvre (1991), The production of space.

“As for the populace, where they were not served by the city of capital and luxury,
they reacted as best as they could, according to their needs, to the extent of their
provocation, and to the immediate circumstances of their everyday life. Between
submission to the intolerable and outraged revolt against it, they somehow defined a
human existence within the walls and along the passage of their streets.” -- Anthony
Vidler (1978), “The scenes of the street”

8
 “If modernity was driven by the desiring machine of capitalism, promising to install its
regime of production and consumption everywhere, the everyday, serving as a minimal
unification of the present and signalling the level of lived experience and reproduction
would, in fact, negotiate the compelling demands of homogeneity through the mediations
of a past that constantly stood in a tense, often antagonistic, relationship to the present of
the new.” --Harry Harootunian (2000), History's disquiet: modernity, cultural practice, and
the question of everyday life
-“03-Flats” (2014), tut IV
homemaking, neither mother or wife; embodied architecture; cf state heteronormative aims
“Keeping cats, hoarding things” (Lilian Chee 2017) HDB laws but they not very strict
“domesticity’s excess” – disrupting state intentions; corridors, void decks
maintaining rituals and traditions in spite all odds (Joshua Comaroff 2007)
People trying to make life/space work for themselves  HDB are meant to design for nuclear
family not as a working space.
Outside of HDB is supposed to be a public space
After resettle of the population, there’s much lesser temple  if you got money then u can bid
loh

9
-ethnography of everyday life
making the invisible visible
reflecting through everyday life

from outsider views: docile Singaporeans who succumbed to materiality

trivial, mundane – not taken seriously
yet best materials for reflecting on socioeconomic transformations, esp rapidly-changing
Singapore
complexities

Everyday life seems mundane to most of the researchers, but to think about it, it is
actually a good way to study how society transform

10
-updates to Goransson (2009)
weekdays/workdays: very busy/exhaustion – or loneliness (elderly)
weekends/rest days: family time, catch up sleep

material gains
for most: daily toll, Faustian bargain
for the less advantaged: no light at end of tunnel
stoicity

on the train track, playing safe in spite of everyday tedium/boredom

alternative lifestyles, challenges

continuing observation, reflection; value of every individual

11
final test
1. one question in two parts; answer in essay format
2. duration: one and a half hours
3. may bring notes but hard copies only; no electronics, no internet
4. writing paper will be provided; write with pen
5. prep: revise thoroughly; use notes only as reference

read question carefully

5-10 minutes for a draft and structuring your essay
contents count

12