1. Introduction
In May 2019, local news reported sightings of a “jungle house” situated on the eighth floor of a housing block in the eastern region of Singapore built by the Housing and Development Board (HDB)Footnote 1 as part of Singapore’s public housing programme. From a distance, a “jungle” appeared to have colonised the entire staircase landing at one end of the corridor in the multistorey building (Ong, Reference Ong2019a). As you approached the landing, a smother of branches, leaves, and vines made it impossible for anyone to pass through to the other side of the building. The “jungle” was a collection of more than three dozen potted plants of varying heights belonging to an owner-occupier of the corner unit on that floor (Ong, Reference Ong2019b). Neighbouring flat owners told the media that the “jungle” had been around for almost nine years, and their homes had been invaded regularly by creepers and red ants from those pots (Ong, Reference Ong2019b). Despite being repeatedly advised by the town council to remove the plants, the “jungle house” owner would move pots into her flat only temporarily, and return them to the common area after some time (Ong, Reference Ong2019b).
The “jungle house” is one example of how owners of public flats, locally known as HDB flats, overreach the legal boundary of their property. It is public knowledge that the ownership rights of HDB flat owners do not extend to the common corridor outside their flats. Although no official statistics on the prevalence of this practice were available, a spot check by local media at 70 public housing blocks found “cluttered corridors in almost every block,” with 60% of 200 respondents polled by the media reporting similar sightings (Liew et al., Reference Liew, Heng and Chan2025). HDB flat owners typically do not take legal action against one another for this sort of boundary-crossing; instead, they depend on the town council of their housing estate to take enforcement action. Despite by-laws prohibiting the use of common areas outside the flats (Town Councils Act 1988 (2020 Rev Ed), s. 28) and the risk of a fine of up to $2,000 (Town Councils Act 1988 (2020 Rev Ed), s. 72), HDB flat owners frequently place household articles, such as door mats, plants, metal racks, plastic boxes and containers, cabinets, chairs and stools, brooms, mops, pots, pans, unused electronics, bird cages, bicycles, lanterns, and festive decorations, along the common corridors.Footnote 2 In contrast to accounts of a Singapore state that successfully operates “a regime of explicit regulatory intervention reaching into … many aspects of a citizen‘s daily life” (Tremewan, Reference Tremewan1994, p. 2), such as in the areas of citizenship education (Gopinathan, Reference Gopinathan2013, pp. 120–31; Chia, Reference Chia2015), language and culture (Tremewan, Reference Tremewan1994, pp. 74–91, 144–8; Gopinathan, Reference Gopinathan2013, pp. 69–88, 109–19; Chua, Reference Chua2017, pp. 57–67, 123–56), and familial relations (Teo, Reference Teo2010; Chiong, Reference Chiong2021), the persistence of overreaching practices by HDB flat owners suggests that law is not able to maintain “outside/inside” distinctions through its boundary work along these corridors. Does this mean that the legal ordering of spatial relations has broken down?
In this paper, I explore the use of Hans Lindahl’s concept of a-legality (Reference Lindahl2008, Reference Lindahl2011, Reference Lindahl2013, Reference Lindahl, Bedorf and Herrmann2019) to provide an alternative reading of what happens to the legal ordering of spatial relations when HDB flat owners overreach their property boundary. Before that, I will briefly set out the characteristics of the legal boundary of HDB flats and explain why the conventional legal/illegal parameters associated with the exclusionary and “bundle of rights” theses of property do not suffice as an analytic frame. When an eligible individual buys an HDB flat, he/she signs a contractual agreement (the HDB lease)Footnote 3 to hold a 99-year lease of the property,Footnote 4 thereby crystallising three types of boundaries with respect to ownership. The first is a geographical boundary that identifies each flat in terms of its own shape, layout, dimensions, and spatial coordinates in relation to the land on which the housing block sits.Footnote 5 This geographical boundary is what the “exclusionary” theory of property refers to when it posits that law’s boundary encloses a thing or an area of space in a way that gives the owner a sense of dominium “inside” of it, and a message to those “outside” of it to keep out (Penner, Reference Penner2000, pp. 68–104; Smith, Reference Smith2003; Stern, Reference Stern, Penner and Otsuka2018). The second boundary is constituted by the buyer’s right under the HDB lease “… [to] peaceably and quietly hold and enjoy the [f]lat … without any unlawful interruption or disturbance ….”Footnote 6 This right subsists on the condition of compliance with the terms of the lease. Flat owners who breach any of the lease terms (e.g. by causing a nuisance to othersFootnote 7 or obstructing the common areas of the building)Footnote 8 risk having their flat repossessed.Footnote 9 This use boundary is part of the “bundle of rights”Footnote 10 that comprises the substantive content of public flat ownership. A third boundary in the form of by-laws enacted by the town councilFootnote 11 regulates how HDB flat owners use the common area and facilities “outside” their flats. This includes use of common corridors, lift lobbies, elevators, walls, stairways, fire escapes, entrances and exits of the building, the roof, installations that provide essential services such as power, light, and water to the building, car parks, gardens, and recreational facilities built for the use of the housing estate (Housing and Development (Common Property and Open Spaces) Rules (1999 Rev Ed), r 2(1)). The physical design of the housing block creates a contiguous spatial threshold between the “inside” and “outside” areas of the flats whereby the front doors of the flats open into common corridors. Since ingress and egress to the flats require the use of elevators which can only be accessed by walking along the common corridor to the lift lobby, use and enjoyment of the flats are interconnected with the HDB’s control and management of the areas outside the flats. Use of the common property is therefore an integral part of the public housing ownership experience.
Although ownership creates territory (Blomley, Reference Blomley2016, p. 225) by producing boundary-generating norms that assign the owner the authority to set the agenda on how the space “inside” the legal boundary is used (Katz, Reference Katz2008, pp. 277–8), everyday boundary-crossing in Singapore’s public housing estates by HDB flat owners cannot be understood in terms of the exclusionary or “bundle of rights” theses of property for two reasons. First, the exclusion thesis primarily requires non-owners to stay out of and HDB flat owners to stay within the geographical boundary. By conceptualising an owner’s use of property in terms of the power to exclude others from it, this thesis does not “define the contours of an owner’s position” (Katz, Reference Katz2008, pp. 279–85). When behaviours such as drying laundry do not align with yet attract no enforcement of the legal norm on the basis of illegality, the explanatory power of the thesis runs out. Second, the “bundle of rights” thesis operates its own legal/illegal distinction according to the parameters of the use boundary. Under this thesis, law’s boundary work has an adaptive quality due to the interpretative scope inherent in translating the word-based rule of the use boundary into embodied behaviours within a spatial setting. However, this thesis does not provide an analytic frame which explains how the three types of boundaries work contemporaneously.
Through the lens of a-legality, the ostensible “disruption” to the legal order brought about by boundary-crossing behaviour in the common corridors “reveal[s] another legality, other possibilities of drawing the distinction between legality and illegality in the legal order [being contested]” (Lindahl, Reference Lindahl2008, p. 125). Whilst a legal regime using the lens of (il)legality closes down on or penalises non-compliant behaviour, Lindahl argues that a-legal situations challenge this polarity by opening up practical possibilities of an alternative expression of ordering which cannot be accommodated within the normativity of the existing legal order. This opening-up approach allows us to make sense of the normative work of all three types of boundaries as a single situational configuration. Data for this paper was compiled from publicly available press releases in English and Mandarin, social media posts, parliamentary debates, and photographic and videographic materials. Legal materials for this paper include a set of specimen contractual documents governing HDB flat ownership, as well as primary and secondary legislation, all of which are also in the public domain.
The remaining part of the paper is organised into the following four sections. Section 2 discusses some limitations associated with the legal/illegal dichotomy of law’s boundary in the context of understanding the spatial relation between states and individuals. Section 3 discusses how socio-legal research has problematised the (il)legal binary and outlines the theoretical elements in Lindahl’s concept of a-legality. Section 4 analyses three groups of boundary-crossing scenarios in the common corridors of Singapore’s public housing blocks through Lindahl’s lens of a-legality: (1) situations which persist and present as a social norm; (2) situations which persist but present as socially undesirable; and (3) uncommon situations. Section 5 concludes.
2. Boundaries of (il)legality
In studies at the intersection of law and geography, legal boundaries are “hybrid zones that intermingle ‘private’ and ‘public’” (Blomley, Reference Blomley2016, p. 245), presenting “a frontier or border, a dividing line or threshold; and [a reference] to extremities and confines, limits and peripheries” (Blandy and Sibley, Reference Blandy and Sibley2010, p. 277). Outside of encountering boundary as concrete objects like fences and walls, individuals who engage in boundary-crossings encounter legal boundary in the form of state practices. Legality-illegality distinctions operationalise as “a series of boundaries between insider/outsider, citizen/other, secure/dangerous, deserving and undeserving” (Hall, Reference Hall2012, p. 2). As its name suggests, the business of regulating boundary-crossing reflects an interest in controlling the flow and movement of people, goods, services, and ideas between locations. Modern nation states engage in boundary-making with law to capture and manipulate such flow and movement for their political, economic, and social agendas.
Law’s boundary produces and is produced by multiple “sites of enforcement” (Weber and Bowling, Reference Weber and Bowling2004). Unlike fences and walls that permit or prohibit individuals with the explicit gesture of a physical barrier to entry, legal boundary extends beyond physical borders through the implementation of state practices and processes of inclusion and exclusion on individuals (Tuckett, Reference Tuckett2015; Cold-Ravnkilde, Reference Cold-Ravnkilde2022). In the field of immigration, the state deploys legal boundary as national border, using infrastructure and bureaucratic practices to control who enters and leaves its territory. Studies show that beneath the civilised veneer of the state’s disinterested agenda of sorting legal entrants from illegal ones, state agents operating border infrastructure exert power over the individuals subjected to the procedures and conditions of that space in a physical and visceral way. In the “Locksdon” immigration removal centre, within a “perimeter wall topped with razor wire” (Hall, Reference Hall2012, p. 1), individuals detained for illegality were exposed to the state’s visual practice of power through an intricate procedure of reception. Detainees were “rubbed down,” made to wait in “the dirty room” to be “processed,” strip-searched, measured, photographed, and had their personal possessions searched (Hall, Reference Hall2012, pp. 30–1). In the Machar Colony situated in Pakistan’s financial capital of Karachi, non-citizens in vulnerable immigrant communities endured harassment, threats, and demands for money by local police as part of routine border checks (Waseem, Reference Waseem2024). Police whom they encountered on the street threatened to plant charas (cocaine) or a “TT” (pistol) on their person, or slapped and physically provoked them to induce monetary payment (Waseem, Reference Waseem2024, p. 1560). These situations demonstrate how boundary-crossing individuals are vulnerable to power when state practices operationalise and police the boundary of illegality.
The agenda of security driving the regulation of boundary-crossing at the national borders is equally pertinent to the state’s interest in organising the spatial politics within urban space. In mobility studies in urban cities, motorists who convey themselves from one physical location to another expose their bodies to vulnerability when their modality of daily conveyance is seen as illegal through the eyes of state agents who operate the traffic infrastructure. To get their job done, Syrian delivery drivers on scooters in Beirut engage in zowaraib (weaving in and out between vehicles), double or triple park, go the wrong way down one-way streets, and ride on sidewalks (Monroe, Reference Monroe2014, p. 88). Their unique way of riding the scooter with their feet turned in, as opposed to Lebanese who hang their feet outside the scooter, makes them visual targets for local police seeking to satisfy traffic compliance performance indicators (Monroe, Reference Monroe2014, p. 89). These drivers who engage in boundary-crossing are made to choose, on a daily basis, between complying with legal norms, which entails getting stuck in traffic jams and bringing less money home, or going against the grain of legality, risking collisions and bodily injury to improve their living conditions. In Beirut, when traffic police encountered civilian resistance in the form of a refusal to accept a traffic ticket or a threat to leverage personal connections with individuals in positions of power, the state turned to the technological practice of “tweeting about traffic” from the Twitter account of Beirut’s Traffic Management Center to encourage self-regulation of the boundary between legal and illegal conduct on the roads (Monroe, Reference Monroe2017, pp. 329–30). In these situations, legal boundaries work through state practices with respect to traffic infrastructure to close down the pragmatic possibilities of motorists’ behaviour by policing illegality.
On the flip side of illegality, legality features in what Abrams calls “legitimation-work,” gestures which elicit support for political forms of ordering which would attract resistance and criticism from the local population (Reference Abrams1988, p. 76). Studies on the “slum politics” of how governments of newly independent states negotiate local tensions in urban redevelopment projects exemplify this. Tenurial legitimisationFootnote 12 and compulsory land acquisition were two types of strategies used by these governments to “integrate” the informal housing sector, which typically provided affordable housing to workers in city centres, into their modernisation plans. One example of the former is the Each Family, One Plot (Cada familia, um lote) programme in Brazil which sought to issue land titles to favelados (those who lived in informal housing) to increase tenurial security of those occupants within the city with the aim that this would strengthen property values (Handzic, Reference Handzic2010, p. 14). Another example took place in Turkey, where a local form of “self-help” housing, known as gecekondu, which provided affordable housing for millions of migrant labourers, became misaligned with the state’s vision of Istanbul as a global financial centre which had no place for such workers. By allowing privately run “Certified Special Technical Offices” to technically divide land into formal land parcels, the state created an avenue for private contractors to carry out trust-based negotiations with gecekondu owners to take possession of their lands and construct apartment blocks (Atasoy, Reference Atasoy2017, pp. 667–8). When a devastating earthquake struck Turkey in 1999, the poor quality of housing constructed by these small-scale contractors came to light, and the state abandoned the tenure legalisation strategy in favour of a “property-led redevelopment” under the purview of the Turkish Housing Development Administration (Karaman, Reference Karaman2013, p. 722). Here, state power emanated through everyday spatial relations in the city through the alignment between political gestures and legality.
Boundary-constitution through the lens of legality/illegality thus carries an inherent risk of privileging the normative interests of the state over those of individuals. Besides having access to machinery and resources to enforce legality through institutional and juristic forums, the closed system of legal ordering generated by such a lens accords the state potentially hegemonic power to straitjacket the behaviours and practices of ordinary people.
3. A-legality and spatial relations
The (il)legality binary is conventionally used to analyse the legal significance of a situation with clarity and certainty. Stipulations of a legal order serve as a normative baseline of acceptability, against which behaviours or situations are evaluated according to whether they are aligned (legal) or not aligned (illegal) with those legal norms. Socio-legal scholars, however, have found the strict binary between legality and illegality problematic. Empirical accounts of lived experiences have demonstrated that there is space for action between the legal and the illegal. For example, Latinx immigrants who were spatially immobilised due to being unable to obtain a driving licence as undocumented migrants in Nashville, Tennessee, experienced sympathetic action by certain individual local law enforcement agents who chose not to confiscate expired certificates or licences (Armenta, Reference Armenta2016, pp. 117–8), and were able to adopt strategies such as driving under the speed limit to “socially reproduce” legality (Flores et al., Reference Flores, Escudero and Burciaga2019, pp. 20–3). When il(legality) is operationalised, its binary construct does not recognise and accord value (or protection) to the plurality of ways of being which can present through human life. Bhattacharjee’s discussion of the tension between the conventional private/public binary and the predicament of South Asian immigrant women facing domestic abuse illustrates a general limitation of using categorical binaries to understand spatial relations (Reference Bhattacharjee, Alexander and Mohanty1997). She points out that the private/public binary sets up the roles of domestic worker and battered wife in a way where the former is legally recognised in the “public” space of a workplace but not in the “private” space of a home, yet in everyday life, for a woman who experiences abuse at home, her “private” home (place of residence) is her workplace (where she endures hardships) and her “public” workplace (place of employment) is her “home” (refuge) (Bhattacharjee, Reference Bhattacharjee, Alexander and Mohanty1997, pp. 313–7). Another problematic dimension of the binary is that the law usually stipulates what is “legal” and deems what has been excluded from the “legal” category as potentially illegal. This tends not to square with empirical situations which may unfold in an inchoate manner. An example of this is the illegal behaviour of stalkingFootnote 13 which can only be determined ex post facto, and therefore requires a victim to experience multiple occasions of distress before the illegality of conduct becomes manifest enough for the legal rule to bite.
Attempts to find a way to analytically frame situations which fall “in-between” or outside the (il)legal binary have suggested terms such as “semi-legality” (Kubal, Reference Kubal2013) and “liminal legality” (Menjívar, Reference Menjívar2006). Kubal conceptualises “semi-legality” as a “multidimensional space” where legal status (denoted by a formal relationship with the state) interacts with “various forms of … agency toward the law” (denoted by behaviour and attitudes) (Reference Kubal2013, pp. 566–7). Although he provided typological illustrations to “contest the ‘illegal’” (Kubal, Reference Kubal2013, pp. 570–80), the analytic components of semi-legality were not sufficiently fleshed out, and an explanation of how to use the concept to distinguish between behaviours which are a response to legal status and behaviours which are not was lacking. Menjívar uses the term “liminal legality” as a shorthand to describe a transition space in which immigrants occupy a legally ambiguous position that is “neither an undocumented status nor a documented one, but may have the characteristics of both” (Reference Menjívar2006, p. 1008). The term was, however, not subsequently developed as a theoretical concept.
The above shows a need for a richer analytic space for socio-legal empirical accounts beyond the binary to deal with situations which present both as more or less legal or as more or less illegal. The term “a-legal” was used in Harnecker’s study of a series of public consultations conducted by civilian organisations in Venezuela and Mexico on the countries’ political leadership that garnered half a million and approximately 1.3 million responses respectively (Reference Harnecker2007, p. 111). Though the results of those polls had no formal basis in law, she saw those events as an a-legal space which raised public consciousness and facilitated popular participation (Harnecker, Reference Harnecker2007, pp. 111–2). Apart from describing a-legal space as a place for action which was neither provisioned nor prohibited by law, Harnecker did not proceed to develop a theoretical account of a-legal space (Hughes, Reference Hughes2019, p. 478). Like Harnecker, Lindahl also conceived of a-legal expressions of behaviours and situations which lie outside a legal/illegal binary. However, unlike Harnecker, he did not delineate a-legality in terms of a particular type of “space.” For Lindahl, a-legality denotes the experience of strangeness which “disrupts a legal order by revealing another legality, other possibilities of drawing the distinction between legality and illegality in the legal order they contest” (Lindahl, Reference Lindahl2008, p. 125), and therefore could not be understood in terms of the pre-existing dichotomy.
What constitutes a legal order? For Lindahl, a legal order encloses a “realm of practical possibilities” available to participants within spatial, temporal, material, and subjective boundaries (Lindahl, Reference Lindahl2013, pp. 3, 156–7) by specifying whom may do what, where, and when.Footnote 14 A-legal behaviour draws attention to a normative point of behaviour previously regarded as unimportant or irrelevant to the legal order (Lindahl, Reference Lindahl2013, pp. 156–60), thereby manifesting a fault line in the normative inclusions and exclusions operationalised by that ordering (Lindahl, Reference Lindahl2013, p. 4). As an expression of Lindahl’s four dimensions of a legal order, the legal ordering generated by reading the geographical and use boundaries of the HDB flats broadly stipulates that for the duration of the HDB lease (the “when”), the HDB flat owner (the “whom”) enjoys the right of use and enjoyment (the “what”) of the internal area of the HDB flat (the “where”). This first legal order is nested within a broader legal order circumscribed by the regulatory boundary requiring all behaviour within the common property to comply with the prevailing by-laws. Hereon, I refer to the first legal order as the legal ordering under the HDB lease and to the broader legal order as the legal ordering applicable to HDB flats. In the next section, I analyse three types of boundary-crossing behaviour to show how HDB flat owners and the HDB respond to fault lines of a-legality in everyday use of the common corridors.
4. Everyday boundary-crossing in HDB housing estates
Spatial relations between states and their population are sites of contestation. For a state, sovereignty is obtained by deploying ideologies and practices to control sites and modes of action, interaction, and thought of individuals and social groups. For the latter, sovereignty is expressed as being in the world in a multitude of ways which challenge the nooks and crannies of the state’s paradigm of control. In Singapore, friction between the state’s interest and the interest of ordinary people over the occupation and use of space manifests from time to time in various settings, such as the occupation of the city centre through informal housing settlements (Loh, Reference Loh2009b, 2013) and the use of land as burial grounds (Yeoh, Reference Yeoh2003, pp. 281–311; Huang, Reference Huang2014). On a more micro-scale, a local architectural feature: the verandah, “an open arcade or light-roofed gallery extending along the front of shophouses and tenement dwellings as a continuous walkway” (Yeoh, Reference Yeoh2003, p. 245), was a historically contested site claimed by both the British administration and the Asian community of daily users. Whereas the British saw the verandahs as clear and unobstructed spaces for pedestrian flow, Asian users saw these spaces as “capable of accommodating more than one legitimate use at any one time,” for example for loading and unloading goods, stowing boxes and crates, displaying merchandise, hawking goods and services, and as a resting place (Yeoh, Reference Yeoh2003, pp. 245–7). Yeoh observed that instead of complying with the order prescribed by law, the communities who used the verandahs daily ordered their behaviours according to the social customs of the secret societies who laid claim to those spaces as their territory (Yeoh, Reference Yeoh2003, p. 248).
In the common corridors of HDB housing blocks, which perform a common thoroughfare function like that of the verandahs, a similar tension persists in a more subdued form. For Chee, the common corridor is one of two sites (the other being the void deck) “where the housing block’s public space frays against the flat’s private domestic space,” and where “domesticity’s excesses thrive on impropriety, thwarting alignment with housing’s proper intents” (Chee, Reference Chee2023, p. 138). The common corridors of HDB flats were designed to act as “the courtyard in the sky”—a space for households living along the same corridor to interact with one another, direct wind into the units, and allow natural light into the flats (Quah, Reference Quah1997; Ng et al., Reference Ng, Chua, Tampus, Quek and Tan2023). As is the case with living in multi-storey high-density buildings, for HDB flat owners, the common corridors are the only means of ingress and egress to the front doors of their homes. Although two forms of legal ordering regulate the use of the common corridor—the legal ordering under the HDB lease and the legal ordering applicable to HDB flats—it is common to see domestic activities of HDB flat owners extend beyond the geographical boundary of the flats, spilling over into the common corridor in a myriad of ways. Like the act of autoréduction by the chômeurs in Lindahl’s illustration of a-legality, personal use of the corridor enacts “a-legal interruptions” which create “a situation of indeterminacy” (Lindahl, Reference Lindahl2013, p. 36) within the legal ordering applicable to the HDB flats. In general, spillover use makes the “unordered” expression of use and enjoyment of the HDB flats manifest within the legal order “as another possible ordering of behaviour” and thereby challenging “the realm of practical possibilities” (Lindahl, Reference Lindahl2013, p. 158) available under the legal ordering applicable to HDB flats.
Observations of boundary-crossing behaviour along the common corridors of HDB flats can be organised into three groups: (1) situations which persist and present as a social norm; (2) situations which persist but present as socially undesirable; and (3) uncommon situations which present for an indeterminate period. Group one situations are commonplace, unsurprising, and accepted as part of daily life. This manifests as a practice shared by HDB flat owners who live along the same corridor or within the same block. Such practices involve the placement of household articles described in the introduction of this paper.Footnote 15 An example of group one situations in a slab block design housing block is discussed in Section 4.1. Group two situations persist but are regarded as socially undesirable; a common manifestation being the practice of compulsive hoarding, which is discussed in Section 4.2. Group three situations are of peculiar quality. These situations are not commonplace, and do not fall into either group one or group two situations. An example of this is discussed in Section 4.3.
4.1. Group one: persistent boundary-crossings
The slab block design, a standard architectural form of public housing in Singapore in the 1960s, gives personal use of common corridors high visibility.Footnote 16 This building style groups several units of HDB flats together in a rectangular slab, arranging them along the same side of a common corridor which is visible to people looking at the external façade of the building. Due to the layout of the HDB flats in a slab block, this type of flat tended to have only one set of windows opening out to the front of the flat and two sets opening out to the rear of the flat, with an intervening area built as a single contiguous column of space with minimal light and air penetration (Chee, Reference Chee2023, p. 145). The use boundary, which only provides a general written statement with regard to the use and enjoyment of the flat, regards the actual adequacy of light and air flow within the internal areas of the flat in the context of daily use “irrelevant and unimportant” or in Lindahl’s terms “unordered” (Lindahl, Reference Lindahl2013, p. 158)—a normative condition which falls outside the practical possibilities envisaged by the legal ordering under the HDB lease. It is not uncommon for HDB flat owners dealing with this type of physical constraint in their flats to place household plants in the sunlit areas of the common corridor, suspend their laundry on poles along the corridor, or drape their garments directly over sections of the common parapets.Footnote 17
Such a response to the problematic quality of sunlight and ventilation inside their flats reflects, in Lindahl’s terms, the exhaustion of normative empowerments within the geographical and use boundaries of the flats due to the difference between how law makes boundaries on paper (written form) and how those boundaries manifest as the experience of a built environment (physical and spatial form) by HDB flat owners. When HDB flat owners collectively restrict their spillover use to a modest stretch of the corridor in close proximity to the front doors of their flats and maintain a clear width of 1.2 metres in the corridor (the requirement of the fire safety bureau), they express a modality of a-legal behaviour which allows an adaptive quality of the norms which constitute the legal boundary to emerge. In this situation, although plants and laundry are placed outside the geographical boundary, the use boundary of the legal ordering under the HDB lease is able to and has a practical basis on which to accommodate this new norm. By regarding these behaviours not as illegal, but as “unordered,” an a-legal reading suggests that the persistence of this form of boundary-crossing is a way for HDB flat owners and the HDB to maintain “practical engagement” (Lindahl, Reference Lindahl2013, p. 121) between the normative meaning of the use boundary, “… [to] peaceably and quietly hold and enjoy the [f]lat … without any unlawful interruption or disturbance …”Footnote 18 and its physical meaning: the lack of sunlight and ventilation inside the flat curtails the owner’s ability to do laundry and grow plants strictly within its confines. This expression of a-legality opens up the possibility of a new social equilibrium along the common corridor and explains why it is a regular sight in many housing blocks.
4.2. Group two: persistent undesirable boundary-crossings
Not all forms of a-legal behaviour along the common corridor are accepted as an alternative form of ordering. An example of an extreme form of boundary-crossing behaviour is compulsive hoarding. Compulsive hoarding by HDB flat owners typically involves the storage of large quantities of unused household articles along significant sections of the common corridor accompanied by an unwillingness on the part of the HDB flat owners to discard them (Ministry of National Development, 2022). Telltale signs of hoarding include dusty collections of old shoes and clothing, broken brooms and mops, multiple sets of boxes made of cardboard, styrofoam, and plastic, huge stacks of old newspapers and magazines, broken suitcases, trolleys, prams, bicycles, old furniture, and faulty electric equipment, such as fans and kettles (Liew et al., Reference Liew, Heng and Chan2025). Obstruction caused by hoarding in common areas constituted 32% of estate maintenance issues for town councils (Parliamentary Debates Singapore, 2015) and significantly increased the time that emergency services would take to evacuate a resident having a heart attack from 1 minute and 15 seconds to 3 minutes and 35 seconds (Liew et al., Reference Liew, Heng and Chan2025). In one case, an HDB flat owner reported sending “a hundred e-mails to various authorities” over a period of nine years about hoarding by his neighbour to no avail until the corridor clutter caught fire one day, resulting in a casualty because firefighting efforts were hindered by objects (Koh and Mujibah, Reference Koh and Mujibah2022; Yong, Reference Yong2022).
Compulsive hoarding as a form of nuisance emanating from the use of the HDB flat manifests the normative illegality under both the HDB lease and the by-laws. Why it persists is related to the “unordered” norms (Lindahl, Reference Lindahl2013, p. 158) which become manifest through the lens of a-legality. In this situation, two “unordered norms” are in play. The first is the government’s diagnosis of hoarding behaviour as a “symptom of underlying mental health conditions, social isolation, trauma or deep grief” which are difficult to treat and have a propensity to recur (Ministry of National Development, 2025). The second is the government’s reluctance to interfere with how HDB flat owners upkeep their homes (Parliamentary Debates Singapore, 2025). This norm is grounded in the historical deprivation and suffering experienced by the people who endured draconian compulsory acquisition exercises in the 1970s and 1980s, exercises framed by the government as a “Robin Hood operation” (Parliamentary Debates Singapore, 1987). Using land acquisition legislation, the government seized land from private landholders (Chua, Reference Chua2017, pp. 76–8) and displaced/resettled large groups of people living in urban kampongs (Loh, Reference Loh2009a, Reference Loh2013).Footnote 19 Today, with two-thirds of land in Singapore owned by the government (The Straits Times, 1979) and 76% of Singapore’s resident population residing in public flats (HDB Annual Report 2024/2025, Key Statistics, p. 7), the government’s political legitimacy is grounded in its historical promise to improve the material conditions of the people through its national development and home ownership policies (Chua, Reference Chua1997, pp. 132–4). It is thus morally estopped from taking legal action which disrespects the ownership rights of HDB flat owners. In this situation, the maintenance of the “practical engagement” between the normative meaning of the use boundary, “… [to] peaceably and quietly hold and enjoy the [f]lat … without any unlawful interruption or disturbance …”Footnote 20 and its physical meaning: the removal of dangerous corridor clutter, cannot be attained through a reading of illegality due to the broader normative context constraining how the public housing scheme is operated from a policy perspective. In these circumstances, an a-legal approach provides a resolution strategy.
4.3. Group three: uncommon boundary-crossing
For two to three years, the sight of a 1-metre tall 50-litre enclosure made of glass and steel brimming with more than half a dozen koi fish (Hong, Reference Hong2018), about 10 to 20 centimeters in length (Cai and Song, Reference Cai and Song2018), greeted people who walked past a ground floor flat situated at Tampines Street 41 (Toh, Reference Toh2019), a housing estate located in the eastern region of Singapore. The tank was popular with members of the public, some of whom lived in the western regions of Jurong and Bukit Panjang and travelled to the east to visit this local attraction (Toh, Reference Toh2019). It was built by Mr. Tan and his family, who owned two adjacent ground-floor units, each serviced by a short flight of five concrete steps with a metal handrail leading up to the front door of each unit (Hong, Reference Hong2018). Since the family only used one of the entrances to access their home, Mr. Tan decided to construct a bespoke tank for his fish on the unused set of stairs (Hong, Reference Hong2018). He removed the existing metal railing, installed a metal structure and glass panels into the concrete steps and its adjacent external wall, painted sections of the steps and wall blue, thereby creating an enclosure for the fish.Footnote 21 In August 2018, the tank was featured in the local news and by April the next year, it had been dismantled after a failed appeal by Mr. Tan to retain it (Toh, Reference Toh2019).
The indication that this was a situation of a-legality lay in the characterisation of the tank as “unusual” by the local media and the town council—a short form of what Lindahl calls “the privileged legal mode of appearance of the alien or strange” (Lindahl, Reference Lindahl, Bedorf and Herrmann2019, p. 256). Following Lindahl, the space outside Mr. Tan’s HDB flat was “… never only a geographical surface, never only the material support of one or more legal systems, but rather a concrete articulation of normative and physical dimensions from [a self-legislating collective]” (Lindahl, Reference Lindahl2013, p. 71). In this context, that self-legislating collective included Mr. Tan, his neighbours, visitors to the tank, local media, the town council, and the HDB. By installing a tank at the common property, Mr Tan’s behaviour did not fulfil “the anticipations of legality/illegality encoded in legal norms” (Lindahl, Reference Lindahl2008, p. 130). Read as illegality, Mr. Tan had installed the tank on common property without approval from the HDB. Read as legality, the tank had operated for about three years with no incident (Hong, Reference Hong2018), and it was not situated along a common corridor, causing no obstruction to the flow of people or goods. Between the time the tank made news in August 2018 and the time the HDB asked for its removal in April 2019, there were media reports of support from some residents who felt that Mr. Tan’s project was innovative and enhanced the community environment (Hong, Reference Hong2018). A Member of Parliament also expressed support, indicating that the town council was “prepared to customize a reaction or response to it and see how [they] could help the resident keep the [tank]” (Channel NewsAsia, 2018).
This situation of a-legality was unlike the a-legality of drying laundry and growing plants in the slab blocks mentioned earlier for three reasons. First, the “strangeness” of drying laundry and growing plants diminishes when observed as a common practice by multiple HDB flat owners in a slab block. In contrast, Mr. Tan’s koi tank was conspicuous and made more so when it went viral on media outlets. Second, modest use of the common corridor, unobtrusive display of laundry and plant pots, together with non-violation of the regulatory boundary made it viable for the self-legislating collective to recognise that corridor situation as an “alternative legality” within the ambit of pragmatic possibilities they could accept. Third, laundry and plants could be easily moved by the town council or emergency services when needed. In contrast, the koi tank being a metal and glass structure affixed to the common property was a physical obstruction because it was not easily removable.Footnote 22 In addition, by removing the metal railing originally installed along the steps, Mr. Tan had disposed of property belonging to the HDBFootnote 23 and the publicity surrounding the koi tank was problematic for the housing authority. From the HDB’s perspective as owner of the common property, allowing the koi tank to remain opened the way for HDB flat owners throughout Singapore to install semi-permanent structures on the common property without prior consultation or approval, and exposed the HDB to liability for installations which did not belong to it.
What is interesting is that during the unfolding of the koi tank incident, the three institutional actors involved—the town council, the HDB and its parent ministry, the Ministry of National Development—rationalised the a-legality of the situation in different terms. In early statements to the press, the town council did not regard the installation as an obstruction (Hong, Reference Hong2018) and, as such, was willing to help Mr. Tan “legalize” the tank (Hong, Reference Hong2018). Read through the lens of (il)legality, this response seemed inherently contradictory—a situation of legality where the tank was not an obstruction would not need any legalisation. However, read through the lens of a-legality, the response suggests that the installation was regarded as illegal within the legal ordering under the HDB lease but could be regarded as legal within the legal ordering applicable to the HDB flats, and could therefore be shifted squarely into the legality of all three boundaries by going through an administrative process of applying for permission. In contrast, the Ministry characterised Mr. Tan’s initiative as “individual encroachment onto common property” (Toh, Reference Toh2019). By using the legal term encroachment, the Ministry unequivocally regarded the situation as one of illegality in terms of all three boundaries. Finally, the HDB declined to characterise the situation with reference to any of the three boundaries. Instead, it explained its decision by identifying three hidden dangers to public safety—the risk of glass shattering, the risk of unattended children falling into the tank, and the hazard caused by the electrical power supply to the tank located outside the flat (Toh, Reference Toh2019).
5. Conclusion
Singaporeans are relatively boundary-savvy when it comes to recognising and reading cultural boundary markers in public spaces. Placement of a generic packet of tissue paper in the centre of a table in a public hawker centre is locally understood as a sign that the entire table has been reserved by the person to whom the tissue paper packet belongs. The examples of boundary-crossing in Singapore’s public housing estates analysed in this paper demonstrate a facet of that spatial-legal sensibility. It also shows how a (il)legality binary does not adequately account for situations emerging from the spatial relation between the state and HDB flat owners which present as variable and fluid life unfolding through public housing ownership. In this context, a-legality can deepen our understanding of the boundary work which law does, that is “the social process by which actors construct and negotiate their social boundaries” (Liu et al., Reference Liu, Trubek and Wilkins2016, p. 276).
As an administrative regime reputed for its prowess in legal ordering (Rajah, Reference Rajah2012) and cultural engineering (Teo, Reference Teo2010, Reference Teo2013; Chua, Reference Chua2017; Kuah, Reference Kuah2018), the Singapore state and its institutions—the HDB and the town council—present a peculiar vulnerability when faced with a-legal situations of boundary-crossing by HDB flat owners. The HDB and the town council refrain from using power under the legal ordering of the HDB lease to close down both commonplace behaviours, such as drying laundry and sunning plants, and risky compulsive hoarding behaviours on grounds of illegality. Instead, the practice on the ground manifests as a-legality which opens up new social equilibriums premised on a self-organisation ethic reflecting reasonableness and pragmatic sensibility. Even where boundary-crossing presents dramatically like in the example of the koi tank and the “jungle house” (Ong, Reference Ong2019a) in the opening of this paper, there is institutional reluctance to enforce the legal ordering under the HDB lease. In these situations, a-legality exposes a social and cultural latitude accorded by the state to the property rights of HDB flat owners, and tacit acknowledgement of the risk of socio-political repercussions of deploying state power in a way which disrespects ownership rights.
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