Enclaves
Digital print on paper
59.4 x 84 cm
2017
Part of ongoing research for Between The Garden and The Ghetto
In 2008, the residents of Serangoon Gardens rallied to petition against Singapore government plans to open a migrant worker dormitory at a disused school building along Burghley Drive. They did this using reasoning based on racial essentialism and property value. The campaign was successful in segregating the new dwellings, Central Staff Apartments, from the landed estate with a separated access road, optical barriers, foliage, and a “lifestyle hub” acting as buffer. The state, along with delivering these concessions, assured residents that the migrant workers would have “self-contained amenities” and be under “strict rules” managing their movements and actions.
Almost all of the capacity for housing some 315,500 migrants on construction work permit status today (2017) is consolidated in massive surveilled dormitory complexes located far from the city and residential areas. This does not include the 239,700 household-bound domestic workers or another 437,500 workers living in spaces converted for rent efficiency. The rhetorics of security, meeting with particular essentialisms and a market logic, have labour, class, and mobility tied to markers of race, gender, and nationality. The same rhetorics that speak of “ring-fencing communal areas of residents”, or of stratified housing situations and gentrification reflecting “the natural workings of society” show up embedded in the very organisation of space for life and living. Unlike public housing, there is no “ethnic integration” quota placed on landed properties and other private housing. The normative population that claims majority hegemony is never singled out as “ethnic”, as “forming racial enclaves” despite forming the vast proportion of the propertied class. Its part in the racialisation of society and the maintenance of such is rarely pointed out, nor its inheritance of colonialist aspirations in demarcating the world. A parallel politics that uses the language of blood and soil is emerging through economic discontent and a creeping nativism, applying grassroots appropriation of state-supplied nationalism to platitudes like “local heritage”, the “pioneer generation”, “real citizens”, “our duty”; levelled against the other and their perceived associations with the establishment. Questions of race blinkered out of sight, this is a xenophobic right-libertarian worldview that calls for hard work, private interest, and no handouts for the undeserved, a restoration of glory to an ostensibly threatened hetero-patriarchal identity. With it comes a new defence, a defensiveness, for the imagined community – reinforcing beliefs in competition predicated on borders, birthplaces, merit, and other rationalised logics that necessitate authoritarian capitalist governmentality. The “solidarity” it offers, couched in violent myths, is in fact more of the same. Bound by the ideological threads of the material conditions that it had been born from, it is not a way out. |
With data on bed capacities and locations of "purpose-built dormitories" derived from various sources, including the Singapore Ministry of Manpower. |
With data on private housing ("condominiums and other apartments", and "landed properties") derived from "resident households by type of dwelling, ethnic group of head of household and tenancy" in "General Household Survey 2015", Department of Statistics. |