Housing, Nation-Building, and Malays in Singapore

This book explores Singapore’s celebrated postcolonial state-building, revealing that the creation of the ‘housing nation’ is inseparable from a longer, quieter history of un-homing whose costs have been borne in particular ways by its Malay minority.Through the housing biographies of five Singaporean Malays whose homes have been remade by state housing across six decades, it offers a view of Singapore's housing achievement from below. It highlights how, through six decades of state housing, Malays have been made into indigenous migrant-citizens: migrants in their own country, fostered into a racialised property-mindedness in which homeownership is less an investment than a calculation of survival.Reading policy through biography and presenting five lives as a window onto the housing nation's quieter costs, this book will be a valuable resource for students and scholars of Southeast Asian urban studies and sociology.