Kah Seng Loh
Work class historian.
Loh Kah Seng is a historian of Singapore and an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Western Australia. He is interested in all things that happened in the history of a city. He is the author of the award-nominated Squatters into Citizens: The 1961 Bukit Ho Swee Fire and the Making of Modern Singapore (NUS Press 2013) and Tuberculosis – The Singapore Experience, 1867-2018: Disease, Society and the State (with Hsu Li Yang, Routledge 2020). He runs Chronicles Research and Education, a research consultancy on the rich and varied heritages of Singapore – housing, industrial, medical, and culinary.
Loh Kah Seng is a historian of Singapore and an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Western Australia. He is interested in all things that happened in the history of a city. He is the author of the award-nominated Squatters into Citizens: The 1961 Bukit Ho Swee Fire and the Making of Modern Singapore (NUS Press 2013) and Tuberculosis – The Singapore Experience, 1867-2018: Disease, Society and the State (with Hsu Li Yang, Routledge 2020). He runs Chronicles Research and Education, a research consultancy on the rich and varied heritages of Singapore – housing, industrial, medical, and culinary.
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Pacific, Singapore has been more open to external ideas and practices of mental health. On the one hand, in both the colonial and postcolonial periods, Singapore has had a diverse multicultural population, which
historically comprised migrants from different parts of Asia and beyond, and which held different views of mental illness. On the other hand, the dominant model of mental health and psychiatry in the city-state is
the western one: namely the British influence in the colonial and immediate post-independence periods, and increasingly from the Second World War, the prevailing American model. Thus, the openness of Singapore to western ideas and expertise, while beneficial in some aspects, is not without difficulty and ambivalence. The shift from asylum-based institutionalization to community psychiatry and the recognized
importance of mental health are definite signs of progress. However, the continuing dominance of western frameworks of psychiatry ignores both the rich experience of clinicians based in Singapore as well as the varied customary ways in which Singaporeans have viewed and treated mental illness. History thus provides insights not only into the social impact of a western-centered psychiatry in Singapore. It also highlights the need for a more grounded paradigm that is appropriately attuned to local circumstances and experiences.
The expert interventions usually failed but still had significant and unpredictable outcomes. By reinforcing patronage politics, they politicised housing and extended state power into urban life. The interventions also created crisis situations of their own making and catalysed social resistance, both spontaneous and organised. Southeast Asian cities became sites of a struggle between competing forms of urban modernity. In contrast to the experts framing modernity and tradition in opposition, however, squatters demonstrated their adaptive “cultures of modernity”, utilising both old and new ways in their pursuit of a modern life.
Influenced partly by the advice of international experts on the need for controlled development, the region’s governments criminalised the informal housing as illegal, represented their dwellers as socially inert and warned of the dire impact such unplanned settlement, like a contagion, would have on the character and future of the society and nation. To varying degrees, they also undertook to either resettle the dwellers in emergency public housing or reorganise social life in the settlements through aided self-help. In only the former British-ruled city-states of Singapore and Hong Kong did the authorities succeed in transforming the face and character of the city; elsewhere, the pressure of patronage politics and the preference for “prestige projects’ greatly limited the scope of the actual reorganisation. Drawing upon James Scott’s concept of “high modernist’ planning and social governance, this paper examines the origins and development of informal settlements in urban Southeast Asia and Hong Kong and the different outcomes of state efforts to transform their residents into “squatters’, colonial subjects and, finally, model citizens of new nation-states.
Pacific, Singapore has been more open to external ideas and practices of mental health. On the one hand, in both the colonial and postcolonial periods, Singapore has had a diverse multicultural population, which
historically comprised migrants from different parts of Asia and beyond, and which held different views of mental illness. On the other hand, the dominant model of mental health and psychiatry in the city-state is
the western one: namely the British influence in the colonial and immediate post-independence periods, and increasingly from the Second World War, the prevailing American model. Thus, the openness of Singapore to western ideas and expertise, while beneficial in some aspects, is not without difficulty and ambivalence. The shift from asylum-based institutionalization to community psychiatry and the recognized
importance of mental health are definite signs of progress. However, the continuing dominance of western frameworks of psychiatry ignores both the rich experience of clinicians based in Singapore as well as the varied customary ways in which Singaporeans have viewed and treated mental illness. History thus provides insights not only into the social impact of a western-centered psychiatry in Singapore. It also highlights the need for a more grounded paradigm that is appropriately attuned to local circumstances and experiences.
The expert interventions usually failed but still had significant and unpredictable outcomes. By reinforcing patronage politics, they politicised housing and extended state power into urban life. The interventions also created crisis situations of their own making and catalysed social resistance, both spontaneous and organised. Southeast Asian cities became sites of a struggle between competing forms of urban modernity. In contrast to the experts framing modernity and tradition in opposition, however, squatters demonstrated their adaptive “cultures of modernity”, utilising both old and new ways in their pursuit of a modern life.
Influenced partly by the advice of international experts on the need for controlled development, the region’s governments criminalised the informal housing as illegal, represented their dwellers as socially inert and warned of the dire impact such unplanned settlement, like a contagion, would have on the character and future of the society and nation. To varying degrees, they also undertook to either resettle the dwellers in emergency public housing or reorganise social life in the settlements through aided self-help. In only the former British-ruled city-states of Singapore and Hong Kong did the authorities succeed in transforming the face and character of the city; elsewhere, the pressure of patronage politics and the preference for “prestige projects’ greatly limited the scope of the actual reorganisation. Drawing upon James Scott’s concept of “high modernist’ planning and social governance, this paper examines the origins and development of informal settlements in urban Southeast Asia and Hong Kong and the different outcomes of state efforts to transform their residents into “squatters’, colonial subjects and, finally, model citizens of new nation-states.
entrepot port to an industrial export economy in the 1960s and 1970s. On the other hand, Singapore’s experience is also informative because it is a land-scarce city-state where many old industrial sites have been redeveloped, making it additionally difficult to conserve tangible industrial heritage.
Singapore is a research project which seeks to traverse new ground in
the field of industrial heritage. Drawing from historian Raphael Samuel’s
useful concept, ‘theatres of memory’, the project makes the case for an
intangible form of industrial heritage.
A Roundtable Presented by the Singapore Heritage Society
Monday 30 November 2009, National Library Building
By Loh Kah Seng
A Roundtable Presented by the Singapore Heritage Society
Monday 30 November 2009, National Library Building
Opening remarks by Loh Kah Seng
Loh Kah Seng grew up in one-room rental flats in the HDB estate built after the fire. Drawing on oral history interviews, official records and media reports, he describes daily life in squatter communities and how people coped with the hazard posed by fires. His examination of the catastrophic events of 25 May 1961 and the steps taken by the new government of the People's Action Party in response to the disaster show the immediate consequences of the fire and how relocation to public housing changed the people's lives. Through a narrative that is both vivid and subtle, the book explores the nature of memory and probes beneath the hard surfaces of modern Singapore to understand the everyday life of the people who live in the city.
This book, based on student writings, official documents and oral history interviews, brings to life various modernist strands – liberal-democratic, ethnic-communal, and Fabian and Marxist socialist – seeking to determine the form of postcolonial Malaya. It uncovers a hitherto little-seen world where the meanings of loud slogans were fluid, vague and deeply contested. This world also comprised as much convergence between the groups as conflict, including collaboration between the Socialist Club and other political and student groups which were once its rivals, while its main ally eventually became its nemesis.