from the shop owner and served specific food such as fried noodles, fried rice, Indian pancakes, noodle soup. A variety of drinks was served by a different stall, sometimes by the shop owner. Such stalls have been replaced by food courts. Street corners were prized as the best location for food and drink shops. Modern construction Modern shophouses are made of reinforced concrete. Loads are carried by beams and piers, built on a grid system. The spacing of the piers is determined by economic factors: wider beams require larger amounts of steel. A plot of land that measures 40 m wide and 12 m deep, could be used to create 10 shophouses, each measuring 4 m x 12 m, or eight shophouses measuring 5 m x 12 m, or something in between. Walls are infill, which means that a row of shophouses can easily be reconfigured, to allow a business to occupy two or more shophouses, by simply removing the dividing walls. A row of shophouses can be built in stages by exposing around 50–60 cm of rebar in the left-right beams at each end of the row. When continuing construction, new rebar is tied to the existing rebar to allow the beam to be continued, thereby removing the need for new structural piers. Singapore shophouses The shophouses of Singapore evolved from the early-19th century during the colonial era. It was first introduced by Stamford Raffles who specified in his Town Plan for Singapore the uniformity and regularity of the building, the material used as well as features of the buildings such as a covered passageway. After the colonial era, shophouses became old and dilapidated, leading to a fraction of them abandoned or razed (by demolition work or, on occasion, fire). In Singapore, the Land Acquisition Act for urban development, passed during the early-1960s and amended in 1973, affected owners of shophouses and worked a significant compensatory unfairness upon them when their shophouses were seized to satisfy redevelopment efforts. Over the decades, entire blocks of historical shophouses in the urban centre were leveled for high-density developments or governmental facilities. Owners and occupants of colonial shophouses in Malaysia underwent different experiences involving a series of rent control legislation put in place between 1956 and 1966. Under the most recent 1966 Control of Rent Act, privately owned buildings constructed before 1948, including scores of shophouses, were subjected to rent price controls to