The kampongs of Singapore’s past are gone, due to replacement by high-rises  within its widely heralded public housing programme. Today, kampongs have almost entirely disappeared in Singapore, swept away by high-rises in what is seen as one of the world’s most ambitious and successful public housing programmes. But what drove this programme and how well has it served Singapore’s generations?

A push to build public housing started under the British in 1920 and the real change came in 1959 when the People’s Action Party (PAP) took power, says Han Ming Guang of the Singapore Heritage Society. There was a need to redevelop certain key areas of Singapore and also to re-house people away from the city as the PAP leaders wanted to make Singapore modern. This process was accelerated after a fire at a kampong in 1961 left thousands of people homeless and deepened government concern about squalid and over-crowded living conditions. In 1960 the Housing Development Board (HDB) was established and within three years had built more than 31,000 flats. With an ambitious mantra of ‘talk less, do more’, hundreds of thousands of people were moved from kampongs into HDB flats, sparking mixed reactions began in Singapore.

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