Abstract

Scholars of nationalism have linked projects such as urban renewal, public housing and architectural modernization to the production of a common national identity. Few have examined the forms of state violence targeted at popular illegalities enjoyed by different classes of citizens. The intensification of the criminalization of gambling from the 1960s to the 1980s in Singapore was part of this complex phenomenon where the very notions of morality and legality had become bound up in the processes of urbanization and nation-building. Rather than interpreting this as part of the growing political and ideological dominance of the ruling party, I analyse the discourses and programmes centred around crime, cleanliness and the built environment so as to construct the positive order against which gambling was posed as a danger. Then, I use media reports to parse the different spatial zones that described a specific relationship between vice and crime. These zones were neither discrete nor hierarchical; instead they were relational and unstable, such that a similar act could be tolerated at one place but criminalized at another. Writing the history of the control of vice opens a window into a process whereby the terrain of popular illegalities was slowly but thoroughly rearranged, and how this unstable process expressed both the limits of criminalization in the context of a strident nationalism, and the relationship between the spatial order of the city and the symbolic order of the nation.