“…the problem is rather to question space, or more exactly, to read space; for what we call everydayness is not the obvious, but opacity: a kind of blindness, or deafness, a sort of anesthesia.”
Georges Perec, Species of Spaces and Other Pieces

In the throes of the pandemic, a retired couple in their 70s lovingly nurtured a secret garden in the forest around Choa Chu Kang. Every day, the uncle, Wu, would cycle two hours from his house to tend to it. Over time, the garden blossomed with a lush array of crops: potato leaves, chilli padi, mint leaves, banana, papaya. It was their “solace after retirement”, Wu would later say. One day, a hiker came across their hidden Eden, posted about it in a Facebook group, and, citing concerns about wild boars and mosquitoes, led Singapore Land Authority (SLA) officers to it. Within a few weeks, the garden, the consolation, was gone.

The peer surveillance and the unfeeling bureaucracy behind the destruction filled me with a glowing rage, followed by profound grief. It felt like I had witnessed a banal act of violence, embedded in an overarching politics of control. Perhaps it was also the cabin fever of lockdown in a dense concrete environment that made me so acutely aware of the natural world, space and freedom.

The Wu case is hardly unique: around the same time, the authorities cleared a 30-year-old neighbourhood garden in Hougang. There are examples from as far back as 2008, with the removal of a collective herb garden in Yishun, and as recently as April 2024, with an 84-year-old aunty’s garden outside her flat in Choa Chu Kang cleared. A neighbour who wrote to the town council pleading the aunty’s case, unsuccessfully, was bewildered. “These little things are some things that are not affecting anybody, and she [was] so happy.” In almost all such cases, the “offenders” were seniors, for whom the gardens provided succour, joy and a sense of purpose. But they were treated as nuisances.

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