What happens when an entire community is moved? Dakota Crescent was one of Singapore's oldest public housing estates and a rental flat neighbourhood for low-income households. In 2016, its residents-many of whom are elderly-were relocated to Cassia Crescent to make way for redevelopment. To help them resettle, a group of volunteers came together and formed the Cassia Resettlement Team. They Told Us to Move tells the story of the relocation through interviews with the residents from the Dakota community and reflections by the volunteers. Accompanying these are essays by various academics on urban planning; gender and family; ageing, poverty, and social services; civil society and citizenship; and architectural heritage and place-making. Through this three-part conversation, the book explores human stories of devotion, expectation, and remembrance. It asks what we can achieve through voluntary action and how we can balance self-reliance and public services. This book is for people who want to understand the kind of society we are, and question what kind of society we want to be.

Auteur

Dr Ng Kok Hoe is Senior Research Fellow and Head of the Case Insights Unit at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore. He also founded the Social Inclusion Project at LKYSPP in 2020, a research programme dedicated to analysing how public policies shape opportunities for participation. He received his PhD in Social Policy from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), where he was a UK Commonwealth Scholar and won the Titmuss Prize. His research is concerned with income security, minimum income standards, housing policy and homelessness. He led the first nationwide street count of homelessness in Singapore and is co-editor of the book They told us to move: Dakota-Cassia (Ethos Books, 2019), which examines the impact of relocation on a social housing community.