Nature may be returning. This could come as a surprise to many Singaporeans. On the one hand, we hear about how secondary forest after forest is razed for development, with land use announcements an endless elegy to nature, and simultaneous paean to all in real estate. On the other hand, less visible at an individual level, is the growing desire to plant, to see plants, to be around plants, to create space for fungi and animals, even in the unlikeliest places. 

The proliferation of urban farming is all the more dramatic given how bifurcated Singapore’s land use was until the mid 1900s: a congested municipal area surrounded by a sparse rural one. Separate government initiatives, including the modified ring plan of 1971, pushed housing and commercial development to outlying areas like Jurong and Woodlands. Singapore was slowly blanketed with public housing estates. What’s happened in recent years is a reversal of that colonial government bifurcation. Now, there are urban farms popping up near, if not quite within, that same municipal area. Indeed, one might argue that any farm in Singapore today is, by definition, an urban farm. Even as we sadly, desperately, lose farms in the north, we create new ones elsewhere.