Everyday negotiations: women's spaces and the public housing landscape in Singapore

Focusing on the everyday lives of ordinary women in Singapore, this paper a ttempts to demonstrate the nexus between space and society in the local con text. It is primarily concerned with the interaction between Singapore's pu blic housing landscape and gender identities through women's daily routines . Toward this end, it first explores how Singapore's public housing landsca pe reflects and legitimises existing gender roles and relations. Through a critical interpretation of public housing allocation policies, this paper a rgues that the state's assumptions of 'appropriate' gender roles and relati ons that are far fi om equal are powerfully engraved on, and legitimised in , the public housing landscape. The paper also examines how women as active agents negotiate understandings and meanings of gender identities through their everyday activities. It reveals that while gender inequalities are re flected in, and reinforced by, women's everyday lives, which revolve predom inantly around the timing and spacing of the activities of home-centred and community-centred settings, it is also through their everyday lives that w omen undertake various strategies to negotiate these inequalities. Overall, the paper demonstrates that although women are fully capable of making a d ifference in their everyday lives temporally and spatially, they remain con strained by an overarching social system which renders uncollected and scat tered resistances in everyday life incapable of upsetting existing unequal gender roles and relations.