Fieldwork on community gardening in Singapore is coming to an end. During his stay, Blaž talked to more than twenty interviewees including gardeners, garden managers and community activists from Boon Lay Nature Garden, Clementi Woods Park Allotment, City Sprouts at Henderson and West Coast Park, Funan Urban Farm, Horts Park Allotment, Jalan Peletok Art Garden, Jalan Senang Community Garden, Liat Towers Garden, One-north Allotment, Pek Kio Park, Tampines Palmwalk Community Garden, Toh Yi Community Garden, Tropica Community Garden and many more. Interviewees also included experts from Participate in Design and the National University of Singapore. All generously shared their time, experiences and insights into community gardening.

But why did CASIE focus on community gardening in Singapore?

The focus of the fieldwork eventually shifted from social innovation to community capacity building for resilient communities and cities due to the difficulty of assessing the resilience of selected case studies in Singapore. Such an assessment would require a longitudinal study, which was difficult to achieve in the two months of fieldwork. Instead, the study focused on community capacity building through community gardening, which is a popular form of collective action in Singapore. In this way, the focus is not on how community gardening affects community resilience. It is about how community gardening affects community capacity to withstand internal and external challenges by collectively coping with, adapting to and shaping change.

The research is therefore about the impact of community gardening on community capacity building including resource mobilisation, skills development, social learning and innovation, leadership cultivation and strategic partnerships. It is about what enables communities to collectively identify and address challenges in their living environment, rather than how they do it in practice.

Apart from the fieldwork on community gardening, the visit to Singapore includes a secondment to the Asia Research Institute, ARI. This proved to be an inspiring place with great people who kindly shared their views and knowledge about different research topics, cities and cultures in South East Asia.

During the secondment, Blaž presented CASIE at the Korean Neighbourhoods beyond Korea, ARI ITB and ARI Asian Urbanisms Cluster seminars. The research on community gardening in Slovenia and South Korea was also presented to students at the Department of Architecture, National University of Singapore, as part of their coursework on community design and sustainable food systems. Blaž also participated as discussant on the Perforating the City workshop, which was a great inspiration and fit for CASIE.

Finally, the article Songhak Maeul: Community capacity building in marginalised neighbourhoods of Seoul, presented at the ARI seminar, will soon be published in ARIscope. The publication provided an unexpected opportunity to revisit community activism in Songhak Maeul and include it as a case study in the ongoing research.

Singapore is a small place, but much remains unexplored about community gardening and perhaps awaits a follow-up study. Meanwhile, South Korea is already waiting for CASIE.