“Eight Hours Only”: Landlords, Tenants, and the Everyday Politics of Air-Conditioning in Singapore

My article explores how air-conditioning helps a private rental market emerge within state-constructed housing in Singapore, along with new forms of bodily discipline and expectations around privacy. While cross breezes had often been necessary to cool HDB apartments, the proliferation of air-conditioning since the 1990s has limited the need for cross breezes and allowed apartment owners to rent out individual bedrooms. This transformation created a class of small-scale landlords operating on thin profit margins who often depend on minimizing costs for their own financial stability. I examine how live-in landlords monitor and limit their tenants' use of air-conditioning to minimize electricity bills, producing a daily time discipline that takes agency and discretionary power away from tenants over their own living space. Nevertheless, air-conditioning as a technical assemblage also shapes the landlord-tenant relationship, presenting affordances for tenants to hinder the landlord's surveillance, or for landlords to limit the tenants' ability to challenge their claims. I show how tenants can use these affordances to reclaim some discretionary power over their own living spaces.