Forests Atop the Concrete Jungle

Disclaimer: Because I mention my job in this post I am enforcing the anonymity rule with comments. Do not mention my name, position, company or office location. Any comments that do will be deleted. Same applies to me, I will NEVER refer to my position, company, its location beyond country, refer to colleagues or anything they say. I will also never post pictures, taken of either colleagues or on the office premise. In general I will be as vague or broad as possible with details! Thank you.

So today I am walking out of my new office (I love saying that!) and into the lobby of sorts we share with the other branch offices of our lovable, multi-national corporation to notice two construction workers drilling green leaves into the wall. Yes, you read correctly, they were drilling holes in a newly added facade wall in the lobby and plugging a ranging selection of grasses and ferns into each hole.

According to the rumors circulating through the oddly always crowded and bustling lobby, it is our corporation's desire to go green and add some life to our always open air office.

Considering my last two offices were so sterile they could have doubles as surgical theaters, this was a sudden change of sorts.

I have to say without a doubt... I love urban gardening and quickly noticed I was spending too long staring at the construction workers as they went about their duties... earning a few perplexed stares back before I head back to my desk after my bit too long bathroom break.

This is one rising trend that is certainly not a fad or theme running through Singapore at the height of the laughably obvious global warming debate (seriously, if you don't think Human activity is not effecting our world, play a game called count the extinct animals for just the last decade... it stop's being a game real quick). Singapore is one the country is actively making an effort to incorporate the ideals and designs of urban gardening into itself.

Every day I head out in the plaza that lays before our office, I get a glance up at the oddest skyscraper you'd ever see. It has to be at least 50-stories but its missing chunks, like someone cut entire floors and cubes out of the structure. From down on the street you can't miss these sudden voids of space, where you can clearly see the sky beyond and long concrete stilts holding up an amazingly immense portion of the structure above it.

You can also see the tops of trees growing up and out of those voids.

Yep, from down on the ground I can clearly see the green of leaves swaying in the wind and from some of the better angles I can definitively see those are tree branches, not bushes. There is literally a forest of green several hundred feet in the air.

And it doesn't stop there, the floors that do have continuous domain over their section of the structure actually have balconies and even pods hanging off of them, each with a fully grown tree or garden to support it.

On the ground it is about the same, any space that is open seems to be bursting with plant-life. Buildings are covered in creeping vines, tall palms cluster every patch of ground and special care is used to maintain them, to make it appear during your ride down the highway that you've suddenly driven into the rainforest.

When polled, almost 80% of Singaporeans voted for more urban gardens, more parks, less restrictions on community gardens and more buildings that actively incorporated a common area dominated by nature.

In fact, the idea is so popular the new EDITT Tower being built in the heart of the city will be the first of its kind, a paragon of “Ecological Design In The Tropics”. Read more here.

I will also admit I've noticed the animal life is missing and tragically I know that even these tiny patches of green are not enough to sustain Singapore's larger fauna. Birds are prevalent, a particular black bird with yellow cheeks seems to fill the niche of Pigeons or Red-Breasted Robins out here... the little buggers also squawk, not sing, so they're all the more noticeable.

But still, anyone who has lived in New York City will note the only real place where you can be considered in a forest is in Central Park, out in Brooklyn's Prospect Park or lost in the horrifying suburban twilight zone that is Staten Island. But these are all finely kept, with lawns that never grow thick and always look like they have been trampled flat into artificial astro-turf. Even the lakes and waterfalls in Central Park are fake, maintained by complex pipes and pumps that keep the waters nearly clear and always flowing.

Yet take one hour to walk around Singapore and you'll notice the residences themselves will install gardens anywhere they can, they will literally cast aside the well manicured lawns in some areas to establish gardens entirely planted in clay pots sitting on the aforementioned lawns, expanding these all the way up to the open air walk-ways in the HBD apartments you'll find the corridors lined with fruit plants and ferns. Plastic trash-cans are left out to collect rain water, which falls amply, and none are ever fenced in or vandalized. Most carry a greater variety of fruits and vegetables than any normal supermarket could conceivably hold either.

There are actually dangers to this type of gardening, as it adds some clutter to the hallway, making movements a restrictive when you stumble in from work or God forbid fire-fighters must rush in to put out a blaze. It can be fatal too, as reports of heavy clay pots absently placed on window ledges, balconies or too close to stairs have fallen, in one case a 12-year old girl was tragically killed instantly while walking home when a clay pot slipped from the window it sat in and struck her in the head.

But this is act of gardening in an urban landscape is a necessity I believe, Singapore's population continues to swell daily but the amount of land is less than New York City and more or less consumed by concrete. Atop this is the fact that Singapore is a single country by itself, New York has the whole of the United States to turn to for economy, work force, population overflow, disaster support and military/police protection. While economically successful, commercial agriculture is near impossible on this island, which hit almost completely urban only a decade or so ago, now speeding on to become a mega-metropolis.

You can really understand why Singaporeans make an effort to grow their own food, to return as much nature as they can when they have to build housing units, to keep their plants maintained with care and to avoid harm when possible, why they try to be as conservative as possible when they use water (Seriously if you shower longer than 15-minutes they start knocking to see that you are okay!). They are a nation that has to import so much from the outside world, including a far chunk of their workforce, while actively trying to be as independent as possible from the same world.

It certainly is a concentrated effort to maintain the semblance of nature in this otherwise city island, one that I wish every single American city would take seriously and begin to encourage their citizens to undertake. Support solar and wind energy, support community or personal gardens, support the usual of local plants in landscaping and to avoid plants that only grow to be beautiful for one season before they wilt in winter.

Be like Singapore, where a forest can be grown on a skyscraper, where a lobby wall can become a pasture, where even the hallway of an apartment can be a garden.