Rethinking graduated citizenship: Contemporary public housing in Singapore

Abstract The ways in which citizenship and housing are implicated in states’ global city aspirations demonstrate significant path dependency and local contingency. This paper serves to broaden the literature that has been dominated by the Western neoliberal context. First, I argue that The Pinnacle@Duxton – a one-of-a-kind public housing project in Singapore – represents the developmental state’s attempt to graduate its homogeneous public housing landscape, providing for and subsidizing the aspirations of a segment of its increasingly affluent middle class to buy into the ideology of the global city. Second, I show how the graduation of public housing coupled with the exaggerated demand for such exclusive projects validates consumer preference pricing in contemporary public housing. This results in a geographical graduation of citizenship, where the bulk of the population is relegated to lesser options on the edges on the island, unable to fulfil their aspirations for global living. In so doing, I make two contributions to extant literature on housing and citizenship in the global city. One, graduating citizenship is not always a case of states realigning their relationship with their citizens to fit the terms of the market. Two, the denial of citizenship to the global city does not always manifest in terms of substantive rights. Appreciating the unique histories and ideologies underpinning housing policies in global cities is instrumental if the variegated meanings of global cities and the citizenships within are to be elucidated.