ABSTRACT
The architectural discourse of Singaporean public housing is focussed primarily on efficacy, principally framing the aim of public housing as teleological, and subsequently traced and retraced through a progressive trajectory. Conversely, I argue in this chapter that standardised measures of performative and statistical methods used to achieve and justify efficacy fail when they are applied to two public spaces of the housing block—the void deck and the common corridor. I make the case that the discourse of efficacy ultimately represses the affective encounters possible in these public spaces. This chapter reappraises the void deck and the common corridor through the domestic situations of keeping cats and hoarding. I discuss how these situations can be adopted as critical spatial devices to allow a different entry into, and understanding of, the void deck and the common corridor and consequently, discourse on public space in public housing. The spontaneous occupation of public space compels us to rethink the limits of property and prohibitions, the sanctioned and the primal.
