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Singapore plants the seeds for a green revolution to turn city state into a garden
- Singapore’s government has a goal to plant 1 million new trees by 2030, so in the future no citizen should live more than a 10-minute walk from a park
- Hundreds of kilometres of routes will connect the various green spaces directly with each other under the city state’s ‘Green Plan 2030’
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Singapore’s founding father Lee Kuan Yew had a vision for the city state in the 1960s, namely to create a garden city that was green and liveable despite being densely populated.
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Those decades of planning have yielded one of the world’s greenest metropolises, making Singapore a leader in sustainable-building design.
Whether it’s the vertical jungles on the fronts of buildings or the 18 futuristic Supertrees with more than 160,000 plants growing on their metal scaffolding. As an ecological innovator, Singapore is taking it to the next level.
Some say that Singaporeans live in restricted spaces, almost everybody in apartments without having their own garden. To them I say: ‘Guys, the whole city is my garden!’
More action is planned, in the form of extremely ambitious goals to transform the garden city into a city in a garden, as Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong put it in 2012. “It is a play on words … and it means connecting our communities and our places and spaces through parks, gardens, streetscapes and skyrise greenery.”
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The authorities are now going even further, with a “Green Plan 2030” setting out how the transformation into a “City in Nature” is to be achieved by the end of the decade.
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