Lee Kuan Yew, “The East Asian Way—with air conditioning,” New Perspectives Quarterly 26, no. 4 (2009): 111–120.
S.R. Joey Long, “Mixed up in Power Politics and the Cold War: The Americans, the ICFTU, and Singapore’s Labour Movement, 1955–1960,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 40, no. 2 (June 2009): 323–351.
See Alex Au, “The dorms are not the problem,” transient workers count too, May 1, 2020, ➝. Contemporary buildings include Kohn Pedersen Fox’s Robinson Tower, Safdie Architects’ indoor waterfall within the Jewel Changi Airport, Bouygues Batîment International’s modular Clement Canopy, and WOHA’s Singapore Institute of Technology’s campus slated for 2023.
See Lim Yan Liang, “Rethinking Dorms: Next steps for foreign worker housing,” The Straits Times, May 26, 2020, ➝.
Tord Kjellstorm and Bruno Lemke, “Climate conditions, workplace heat, and occupational health in Southeast Asia in the context of climate change,” WHO Southeast Asia Journal of Public Health 6, no. 2 (September 2017): 15.
As a political ideology espoused by Mahathir Mohamed in Malaysia and Lee Kuan Yew in Singapore, Confucianism relinquishes attributes of personal freedom in favor of societal stability and prosperity. These values include social harmony, socio-economic prosperity and collective well-being, academic and technological excellence, loyalty and respect towards authority figures, and a preference for collectivism and communitarianism. Southeast and East Asian countries embraced these values up to until the 1997 Asian financial crisis, where a nation’s culture would determine its fate.
Climatic privilege is a concept derived from our ongoing collaborative project “Climate cultures” between the University of Sydney and National University of Singapore. My colleagues at both institutions (Christhina Candido, Jiat-Hwee Chang, Nathan Etherington, Erik L’Heureux, and Daniel Ryan) and I have been testing this term for a number of architectural contexts in Australia, Malaysia, and Singapore.
Some scholars have also traced Singapore’s urban development as a fledgling colony back to the Jackson Plan or Raffles Town Plan (1822). On Singapore and Lee’s economic philosophy, see Louis Kraar, “Singapore, the country run like a corporation (1974),” Fortune, July 1974, ➝.
Transcript of speech made by Prime Minister Mr. Lee Kuan Yew, Queenstown Community Centre, August 10, 1966, National Archives of Singapore.
Ibid. Fortune magazine was quick to report on Singapore’s interest in global petroleum industries: “Singapore goes to considerable lengths to snare key industries. Two small offshore islands were cleared not only of jungle, but also of resident fishermen and their family graves to make way for an Esso refinery and Mobil oil-storage tanks. Thanks to its obliging attitude and central location, the city-state has become the site of the principal refinery complex in the region. Shell, British Petroleum, and Amoco also process oil there, primarily for Japan and other Asian markets. By the end of this year, total refining capacity will exceed a million barrels a day—making Singapore the world’s third-largest oil-processing center, after Houston and Rotterdam.”
On export and import commodities traded between Singapore and the United States, see “Singapore,” US TradeNumbers, 2020, ➝.
Sonal Jessel, Samantha Sawyer, and Diana Hernández, “Energy, Poverty, and Health in Climate Change: A Comprehensive Review of an Emerging Literature,” Frontiers in Public Health 7 (December 2019): 357, ➝.
Yap Mui Teng, “Singapore’s Systems for Managing Foreign Manpower,” in Managing international migration for development in East Asia, eds. Richard H. Adams, Jr. and Ahmad Ahsan (Washington, D.C.: World Bank Group, 2014), 220–240, ➝.
Refer to Ministry of Manpower, “Foreign Workforce Numbers,” Government of Singapore, 2020, ➝.
Centurion Corporation Limited, “Oversold and underrated,” financial report, October 2015, 10.
Registered accommodations only cost employers around SG$500 per worker, while unregistered spaces can be as low as SG$80 per worker. On the city of Nusajaya, see: Mimi Kirk, “The Peculiar Inequality of Singapore's Famed Public Housing,” Bloomberg CityLab, June 9, 2015, ➝; Teng, “Singapore’s Systems.”
Urban Redevelopment Authority, “Circular to Professional Institutes,” URA/PB/2016/14-PCUDG, September 19, 2016, 1.
National Environment Agency, Good Environmental Health Practices for Dormitories and Hostels, Singapore, November 2008.
Urban Redevelopment Authority, “Appendix D,” Amenity Provision Guidelines for Workers’ Dormitories, 2.
See Environmental Health Guidelines for Dormitories, Singapore, August 2010.
On migrant workers’ salaries, see “TWC2 survey: starting salaries for migrant workers flatlined for the last 10 years,” transient workers count too, January 15, 2017, ➝.
R. Madhavan, $alary Day, YouTube, April 25, 2020, ➝.
Refer to the generic floor plan provided by TWC2. See “Covid-19: the risks from packing them in,” transient workers count too, April 3, 2020, ➝.
See Matthew Sacco, “What Does Singapore Owe its Migrant Workers?” Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs, February 10, 2016, ➝. Ministry of Manpower has instituted an app called DormWatch where workers can log complaints about their living conditions and report defects and broken equipment to dormitory operators. For resources on organisations advocating for migrants’ rights, see: Humanitarian Organization for Migration Economics (HOME), ➝; transient workers count too (TWC2), ➝.
NUS Students' Union,“Makan with Migrant Workers,” Facebook, January 29, 2019, ➝.
Thanks to Nick Axel, Daniel Barber, and Erik L’Heureux for comments on earlier drafts of this essay.
