Racial residential patterns in Singapore: What happens after the implementation of racial quotas in public housing?

Abstract

The Ethnic Integration Policy in Singapore functions to socially engineer ethnic desegregation in public housing. Aside from investigating whether the Ethnic Integration Policy has truly achieved its stated goal, urban researchers have also devoted much attention to investigating the Ethnic Integration Policy’s secondary effects, such as how it has facilitated the creation of divergent resale housing markets for different ethnic groups. Most of these studies focus on the Ethnic Integration Policy’s effects at a household level. Little attention, however, has been paid to the straightforward question of how and to what extent the Ethnic Integration Policy contributes to geographic stratification in Singapore. Anecdotally, Singaporeans find it easy to name which neighbourhoods contain clusters of rich or poor households or which neighbourhoods are popular ethnic enclaves, but researchers have yet to develop a formal model of how the Ethnic Integration Policy and social-economic inequality interact. Using a mix of planning area and survey data, this article examines the spatial relationships between the Ethnic Integration Policy and ethnic and socio-economic clusters in Singapore. This article finds that contrary to past literature that have mostly attributed racial clustering as occurring among racial minorities, racial clustering occurs mostly among the Chinese when nation-level residential change is considered.