9. The Singapore Playground: System of Themed Public Parks that Addresses Environmental, Social and Cultural Sustainability

One of the most interesting facet of nation building is correlated to narrative-making. In the exercise of crafting narratives for nation building purposes, Singaporean planners transformed the park system into an urban iconography, with parks’ design resulting in a symbolic display of narratives that address the social, historical, cultural and ecological challenges of the high-rise environment. The ‘Singapore Playground’ consists in a network of parks of varying size—from community to town and regional parks—linked with park connectors and designed around different themes to provide visitors a diversity of recreational experiences. The park system is a reinterpretation of ideas or concepts about ‘history’ and ‘nature’, of the colonial and western conceptions on park-design, as well as the expression of the processes and the actors that shape the built environment. Conceptualization of the system has shifted from the postmodern accent on aesthetics and place making, to an ecologically-based approach that addresses contemporary environmental challenges, including urban mitigation of climate change, by embracing many thematics that are integral to the contemporary concept of ‘green infrastructure’ and ‘biophilic urbanism’.