Controlled urbanisation: a planned approach to the housing crisis

Abstract

In dealing with housing stress in developing countries, there appears to be a broad consensus behind strategies which are essentially self-help in nature, eg. sites and services programmes, kampong improvement schemes and the like. Very few cities have made use of public housing to solve their housing problems and, in this respect, Singapore is quite unique. The country's quantitative achievements in the field of public housing have, indeed, been impressive and this paper focuses on the extent to which success has been based on the acceptance of town planning and the ideology of high-rise building. This has facilitated a multi-nuclei urban pattern of self-contained developments at relatively high densities, interconnected by a good transportation network. Such a spatial pattern may prove a better alternative to the accommodation of growth than the centreless sprawl, at lower densities, which characterises many other cities in the developed and developing world.