City in a garden

In 1963 Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew planted a Mempat tree in order to start the ‘City in a Garden’ project symbolically.

This was the start of Singapore’s most important greening campaign. The aim was to make the city greener. Since that moment trees and plants have been introduced to make the streets more vibrant. This was also the beginning of several nature reserves to give a home to wildlife.

The City in a Garden has six key areas:

• Inspiring citizens to create a greener Singapore together. Connecting residents, schools and organisations to create groups who can take care of more than 1000 community gardens. It’s important to involve citizens.
• Increasing capabilities of the landscape. Industry partners made several programmes to increase skills standards of industry workers. A training institution for landscape industry was founded in 2007.
• Increasing biodiversity in the urban environment. This project was the start of a greater focus on the health of several species and ecosystems and enhancing the nature reserves. This renewed focus was successful for some native species. The government thinks that more contact with nature will increase the wellbeing of the citizens.
• Establishing world-class gardens. First they improved the Botanic Gardens with success, because in 2015 UNESCO inscribed the gardens as world heritage. Second, the Gardens by the Bay opened in 2012, people can interact with beautiful nature as well at this place. One footnote must be made here. It is namely not true, that Gardens by the Bay attracts remarkable many animals. Namely none of the plants growing on the super trees are native. So the metal trees have confined appeal for local animals. Only animals that can adapt to this manmade area can visit this area, there used to be larger populations before the gardens were built.
• Optimising urban spaces for greenery and recreation. Park connectors link people to parks. And plans are made to transform unused spaces below viaducts into recreation spaces.
• Renewing urban parks and streets. They introduced new species to the parks and planted 2 million trees in the past 45 years.

Source: National Parks Singapore, 2016