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This paper reviews the social and psychological effects of

high external and internal densities. It also reports
findings of a study on the effects of crowding in Singapore
which show that crowding is related to greater worry and
stress, that it weakens parental control over children and
appears to affect their academic performance
adversely. The paper discusses some of the implications
of the findings. It is argued that some of the ill-effects of
crowding can be reduced by developing life-styles
congruent with exigencies of over-crowding as well as by
the use of modern medicines and other social welfare
services. Already in 1897, the sociologist Emile Durkheim
showed the importance of the relationship between a
population and the physical conditions of the environment
in which it lives. The empirical examination of this
relation is widely developed, focusing among other things
on one of the dominant features of the physical
environment: population density, which is growing rapidly
due to the demographic acceleration itself and also to the
increasingly extensive urbanization process. Research
has been carried out at macro and micrological scales. In
the first, it was to observe the effects of high population
density, measured by the number of individuals for a given
area (square mile, acre), on social behavior. In the
second case, the examination focused on the effects of
high density or overcrowding (number of individuals for a
given room) on family and community life. Looking for the
effects of high external densities, we referred to the
studies carried out by JD Calhoun on animal behavior. It
has been observed, on the other hand, that in Singapore
and Hong Kong, which are the places with the highest
population density in the world, the conditions of illness
and mortality have been relatively normalized thanks to
medication. appropriate and the intervention of social
services. It is in nature itself and in the quality of social
life that the effects of the high population density have
been felt most severely. Milgram has shown that this
demographic overload affects daily life at different
levels. Thus the bond which unites the individual to the
social structure to which he belongs continues to weaken,
which leads to conditions of anomie, anxiety and
insecurity. If the we move on to the effects of high
internal density, that is to say inside the family unit, we
see that most of the studies carried out on this subject
are generally lacking in rigor, as Lemkau, Wilner and Baer
note. . It should also be noted that the perception of
physical space for housing is very different in the United
States or in Europe from what it is in Southeast Asia. In
his study on the effects of the high population density in
Hong-Kong, Mitchell having underlined the diversity of
these effects, concludes that they can be brought within
tolerable limits if a certain number of control operations
are carried out beforehand. The study carried out on the
conditions specific to Singapore agrees in many ways
with Mitchell's observations. Persons subject to survey
belong to the category of lowest wage earners. They live
in groups of six in one-room apartments with an area of no
more than 17 m². The voltage index increases with the

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occupancy density. It is also higher for large families and
for residents of the upper floors. Juvenile delinquency
cases depend on the cramped nature of housing, which is
itself linked to the poverty of families. It seems possible
to mitigate the effects of too high occupancy density in
housing units by resorting to types of adaptation to this
kind of enclosed life, as the Japanese do, which turn away
from the outside and establish a rigorous distinction,
social as much as physical, between what is in the private
domain and what is really public. They' strive to
personalize their accommodation, the smallness of which
is to some extent compensated by the diversity of
details. Minimum furniture, movable partitions, each room
may change destination depending on the circumstances.