Kay Pungkothai, the Director of Community Gardening, Skyrise Greenery and Projects at the National Parks Board (NParks) in Singapore, gave a virtual presentation to University attendees as part of the “Community in Bloom” engagement program on Tuesday, Mar. 9.
Pungkothai is part of a team that works to improve the capacity development of community gardening, therapeutic horticulture, and skyrise greenery initiatives in Singapore. She encourages all people of different backgrounds to garden together in an effort to create a ‘City in Nature.’
Pungkothai gave context on what “City in Nature” truly means in order to prove perspective on how her team wants to integrate greeeney into Singapore, and how they plan out and develop those ideas.
“This is something that we are working on very hard,” Pungkothai said. “We want to restore nature back into the city, from the perspective of sustainability and so on. All governments around the world are preparing for climate resilience, and that ‘City in Nature’ vision is linked to meeting some of these climate resilience issues.”
Ecological and social resilience are also important factors during the development of a greener city in the interest of making sure newly introduced habits are sustainable, she said.
“Why would a parks board be interested in social resilience?” Pungkothai asked. “Nature must serve a purpose. It must be useful for the people who live here. While they live here, we want them to interact with nature. We want them to benefit from nature. We have another layer that’s looking at social resilience. This is how we see it as our new paradigm as we develop greenery in our city.”
This idea of “greening” Singapore dates back years. “In the early years, we needed to green out the city,” Pungkothai said. “We needed to build enough public housing to house our citizens, and we needed to do it quickly. You see that one of the preliminary ideas of urban planning back in the 1960s was to have a clean, green city. If we had a clean and green city, the idea was that investors would think, ‘Yes, you are serious about how you are projecting yourself and you have thinking behind your city and planning.’”
Pungkothai and her team went on to intensify pre-planting over the following years, strengthening connectivity between communities and giving attention to the “built” environment.
“When you say “built” environment, you mean the buildings,” Pungkothai explained. “Buildings occupy so much of the footprint in our city. How do we get those buildings as part of our greening facilities?”
One of her team’s projects involved allotment plots, which allow community residents to rent a space in a nature park to grow whatever they wish. More than 20 parks in Singapore have allotment gardens.
“It promotes a space for people to garden because many people live in apartments, so extra space is a premium,” Pungkothai said. “Here, they can come to a park and rent a space for gardening. We have a lot of guide books you can access from our website.”
This new way of gardening allows those who view the practice in an unapproachable, traditional light to become involved.
“There’s a lot of new opportunities that have come about in the last five years in terms of technology that allow us to have simple systems like this indoors,” Pungkothai said. “This is something that we constantly share.”
IMAGE TAKEN from nparks.gov.sg
