Leisure for the Modern Citizen: Swimming in Singapore

In the years following Singapore’s independence, swimming was embraced as a national strategy for modernising both the city and the citizen. During this period, more public pools were built than ever before, and in efforts to boost public fitness, new government organisations promoted swimming as a mass participation activity. The pools themselves drew on earlier traditions of leisure architecture, embedding qualities of novelty and spectacle within the new public housing estates. This helped to demonstrate the successes of the government’s urban development programmes in improving quality of life, but it also reflected greater ambitions than just the material embellishment of the new city. It was hoped that swimming would promote values of physical strength, commitment, and perseverance, thus strengthening a new industrial workforce and shaping a communitarian national character.

This essay discusses the social and political functions of swimming in republican Singapore. It looks at the architecture of public swimming, urban development, public sporting campaigns, and the planned effects that swimming would have on both individual and civic bodies. The intention is to trace the role of swimming in the modernisation of Singapore’s landscape, economy, and citizenship.