Dissecting the multiplicity of urban resistance: The Dakota Crescent housing redevelopment in Singapore

Abstract

Civil society actors often combine or move between multiple modes of resistance beyond contentious protest politics and everyday resistance, yet this remains underexamined in the urban resistance literature. This paper aims to advance the knowledge on this alternative approach to resistance, particularly its potential to function as a democratic counterbalance to top-down urban planning, policymaking, and governance. Mobilising the lens of pragmatic resistance and institutionalist planning theory, the paper examines the acts of civil society resistance triggered by the state-led redevelopment of the Dakota Crescent public rental housing estate in Singapore. Empirical research data was collected through interviews, conversations, and e-mail exchanges with 22 civil society, governmental, political, grassroots, social service, and research actors, as well as a review of 177 documents. The findings uncover the ways in which civil society groups consciously reproduced dominant institutions of planning and activism as an effective strategy to increase the state's receptiveness to their advocacy objectives. Concurrently, they sought to reshape these institutions, often by adopting multiple resistance strategies within the same group or with other groups. This political balancing act between institutional reproduction and reshaping limited the possibility for democratic shifts at a structural level, but nevertheless offered a valuable means of influencing site-specific plans, policy problem definitions, and informal governance processes.