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ABSTRACT
A history of urban floods underlines the state's efforts to discipline people as well as to control floodwaters. We focus on two big cities in Southeast Asia-Singapore and Metro Manila-in the period from after World War II until the 1980s. During this period, both cities traversed similar paths of demographic and socioeconomic change that had an adverse impact on the incidence of flooding. Official responses to floods in Singapore and Manila, too, shared the common pursuit of two objectives. The first was to tame nature by reducing the risk of flooding through drainage and other technical measures, as implemented by a modern bureaucracy. The second was to discipline human nature by eradicating "bad" attitudes and habits deemed to contribute to flooding, while nurturing behavior considered civic-minded and socially responsible. While Singapore's technocratic responses were more effective overall than those in Metro Manila, the return of floodwaters to Orchard Road in recent years has highlighted the short-comings of high modernist responses to environmental hazards. This article argues that in controlling floods-that is, when nature is deemed hazardous-the state needs to accommodate sources of authority and expertise other than its own.
KEYWORDS
disasters, floods, high modernism, Metro Manila, Singapore, urban history
A history of floods reveals not only the impact of human development on the environment, but also the state's efforts to discipline people in addition to controlling floodwaters. In the period from after World War II to the 1980s, two big cities in Southeast Asia-Singapore and Metro Manila-experienced rapid population growth, in-migration, urbanization, and economic development, changes that had an adverse impact on the environment and that worsened the incidence of flooding. As disaster scholars like Piers Blaikie and colleagues (1994) and Mark Pelling (2003) have argued, these floods were not merely natural phenomena; arguably, political, demographic, and socioeconomic causes played a bigger role than the natural processes.
This article extends the human element in floods beyond causes to responses. In postwar Singapore and Metro Manila, state efforts to control floods pursued two aims: to tame nature and to discipline human nature. The first aim was to reduce the risk of flooding through technical measures implemented by the bureaucracy. As Greg Bankoff and Dorothea Hilhorst (2009) point out, the perception of floods as extraordinary...