The early history of Singapore’s public housing programme is well-chronicled. By the mid-1980s, the Housing and Development Board (HDB), established by the People’s Action Party (PAP) in 1960, housed over 80% of the country’s population in 500,000 flats. This paper foregrounds a second, under-studied chapter in Singapore’s public housing history: the mass ‘upgrading’ programme, which from the 1980s to early-2000s, added new rooms to existing flats, remodelled façades with postmodern embellishments, and transformed barren public spaces into landscaped parks and squares.

This paper analyses Singapore’s public housing upgrading programme through two intersecting lenses. First, it understands mass housing, its architecture, and by extension its transformation, as apparatuses to realise multifaceted goals. Second, it situates upgrading within an established political economy of housing in Singapore, as constructing legitimacy and reinforcing control for the PAP in Singapore’s ‘illiberal’ democracy.

Drawing on archival materials and secondary sources, the paper argues that the upgrading programme performed in three key ‘spheres’. Politically, the upgrading programme deployed architectural participation to widen the scope of democracy in public housing, while being wielded as a tool of voter coercion. Socio-culturally, design strategies of enclosure, ornamentation, and representation mediated and reinforced class distinctions between public housing and private condominiums. Economically, flat extensions served to redistributively increase home values and consolidate economic control under the PAP.

The paper concludes by advocating for critical engagement with architectural transformation. Contesting the popular conception of retrofit as a panacea—for gentrification, alienation, and carbon emissions—it calls for recognition of its contingencies and susceptibility to co-option.