Asian Journal of Law and Society· 2026Q2
A-Legal Boundary-Crossings in Singapore’s Public Housing Blocks
- 1citations
- Q2SCImago
- 2026year
Short summary
Singaporean public housing corridors exhibit 'a-legality,' where personal use by residents creates a social and cultural latitude between ownership and property rights, escaping traditional legal/illegal analyses.
AI-generated from the title and abstract; the full text is not read.
Key points
- Examines personal use of common corridors in Singapore's public housing blocks.
- Applies Hans Lindahl's concept of a-legality to understand boundary-crossings.
- Argues a-legality exposes social/cultural latitude between ownership and property.
- Challenges traditional socio-legal approaches that rely on legality/illegality binaries.
AI-generated from the title and abstract; the full text is not read.
Abstract
Abstract Socio-legal studies on legal boundary-crossing provide accounts of how states and individuals negotiate the spatial relation between them in terms of legality/illegality. However, situations which present as both legal and illegal can unfold in ways which escape analytic capture by this polarity, posing a challenge to these approaches. In this paper, I examine examples of personal use of the common corridor by public flat owners in Singapore to test the explanatory power of Hans Lindahl’s concept of a-legality in deepening our understanding of boundary-crossings which take place in Singapore’s public housing blocks. I argue that in these situations, a-legality exposes a social and cultural latitude present in the lived experience of the relation between the social concept of ownership and the legal concept of property which would not be visible through an (il)legality analysis.
The authors' abstract, as published at the source. Asian Journal of Law and Society, 2026 · DOI ↗
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Field: Sociology and Political Science
Sociology and Political ScienceSocial Sciences