Cities within Buildings: the private housing complex and the contingent public, c.1960s

Abstract

This paper is based on ongoing comparative research on the high-rise high-density composite building – a large private housing complex often the size of a city block – that emerged in Hong Kong and Singapore in the 1960s. The composite building is inextricably intertwined in the geopolitics of urban transformation and a vital component of a larger network of ideas and discourses. In mapping the impetus behind and agencies involved in the construction of the composite building, this paper contends that during the period of zoning and legal ambiguities, there exists maximum potential in the intermixing of multiple publics and entities, planned and unplanned. To what extent does it embody the paradox of a model for social integration within a development schema? An examination of the composite building in the two post-colonial cities reveals the contingent status of the occupants and of the citizenry at large, which comprised a predominantly Chinese diaspora ...