ABSTRACT
By analyzing how social conflicts in Singapore have been quieted by visibilizing and invisibilizing them in the urban landscape and its infrastructure, the paper offers an example of how conflictual spaces can be transformed into spatial conflict containment. We do this by showing how immigration of different ethnic groups, economic growth with income differentiation, and urban policies have been integrated over time in one of the most authoritarian democracies in the world. How social conflicts are expressed spatially has been changing over time. Recently, conflicts have been spatially contained in housing, food and consumption practices and public spaces. As a result, spatial, social and ethnic conflicts are currently being resolved in nonviolent forms based on economic development policies and social mixing from which most Singaporeans benefit.
