Learning to be Modern: Domesticity and the Modern State in 1970s Singapore

In 1960, faced with significant housing shortage, Singapore’s government established the Housing and Development Board (HDB) to replace the former colonial Singapore Improvement Trust. The HDB was charged with rapidly increasing the scale of construction of social housing, both within the city and in New Towns. The programme was a great success; by the end of the decade the problems of housing shortage and overcrowding had abated, and by 1976 more than half of Singapore’s 2.3 million residents lived in HDB flats. For many at this time, moving into HDB flats entailed a dramatic change in lifestyle – through new patterns of domestic life, new community structures, and transformed urban landscapes – and residents often needed to learn to adjust to this new, modern way of living.

In this paper I take as my focus various elements of the media campaigns that were crafted by the state in order to instruct Singaporeans how to live such a ‘modern’ life in the early 1970s. In particular, I focus on Our Home (1973–1992), a magazine published by the HDB, and compare this to earlier state-supported campaigns such as ‘Gracious Living’ (1971) and the ‘Singapore Garden City’ (1967). Through this media we can question what being ‘modern’ meant in post-colonial Singapore, which went far beyond the adoption of modern architectural forms, and instead looked toward an economic reconstruction that linked to politics and the shaping of national character. Our Home, which took the guise of an interior decoration magazine, I argue, was a form of social contract. Among its lessons in how to furnish a flat, readers were also taught how to negotiate the new urban and cultural environment they found themselves within, what behaviours were expected of them, and what they should provide in return. The magazine acted as an instructional guide for Singapore’s modern citizenship.