In 1963, Lee Kuan Yew planted the first symbolic tree at Holland Road, launching what became one of the most sustained urban greening efforts in the world. Sixty years later, the phrase used to describe Singapore is no longer Garden City but City in a Garden — a distinction that points to a fundamental shift in how greenery is understood and integrated in planning decisions.
The Garden City Phase (1963–2000)
The original Garden City concept was practical in its origins. A clean, green environment was seen as an economic signal — differentiating Singapore from other developing cities and making it attractive to foreign investment and expatriate talent. The immediate task was planting trees along roads and highways, establishing parks in housing estates and mandating that industrial sites maintain green buffers.
The Parks and Recreation Department (later reconstituted as the National Parks Board in 1990) was responsible for managing Singapore's public greenery. During this period, greenery was largely segregated from the built environment: parks were parks, buildings were buildings. Nature was added around the edges of development rather than integrated into it.
Supertree Grove, Gardens by the Bay · Photo: CEphoto, Uwe Aranas / CC BY-SA 3.0
The Conceptual Shift
By the late 1990s, Singapore's planners had concluded that the Garden City model was reaching its limits. With land at a premium and development intensity rising, simply adding green buffer strips was insufficient. The City in a Garden concept, which gained formal traction in the 2000s under NParks' Streetscape Greenery Master Plan and later the Singapore Green Plan, proposed a different logic: greenery should be embedded within the urban fabric itself — on building facades, rooftops, sky terraces and within the architecture of transit nodes.
This shift had planning consequences. URA's Development Control rules began requiring Greenery Provision Ratios (GPR equivalents for plant coverage) in new buildings. The Landscaping for Urban Spaces and High-Rises (LUSH) framework, introduced in 2009 and progressively expanded, obligates commercial and mixed-use developments to replace the green footprint lost through construction by providing equivalent greenery at higher levels of the building.
Gardens by the Bay as a Statement
Gardens by the Bay, opened in 2012 on 101 hectares of reclaimed land in Marina Bay, represents the most visible articulation of the City in a Garden concept. The Supertrees — vertical steel structures covered in living plants and equipped with solar panels — are designed to make greenery itself a structural and iconic element of the urban environment, not a backdrop.
The site is managed by Gardens by the Bay, a statutory board under the Ministry of National Development. It sits adjacent to both Marina Bay Sands and the downtown financial district — a deliberate juxtaposition that signals the equivalence of nature and commerce in Singapore's urban identity. The two cooled conservatories, the Flower Dome and the Cloud Forest, also function as climate research facilities maintained in partnership with academic institutions.
The Park Connector Network
Parallel to vertical greening, NParks has expanded the Park Connector Network (PCN) — a system of linear green corridors that links parks, nature reserves, reservoirs and coastal areas through a continuous off-road network. As of 2024, the PCN extends to approximately 360 kilometres, with a target of 500 kilometres by 2030.
The PCN changes the urban experience of green space by making it accessible on foot and bicycle without requiring a dedicated trip to a park. A resident in Bedok North can reach the Eastern Coastal Park, the Bedok Reservoir and the Tampines Eco Green area via the network without crossing a single arterial road. This connectivity is planned at the master plan level, with PCN corridors reserved through development control conditions applied to adjacent land parcels.
Where the Concept Stands Now
Singapore's 2030 Green Plan, published in 2021, commits to planting one million more trees by 2030, extending the nature reserve network and expanding vertical greenery requirements. The plan also sets a target to bring every resident within a 10-minute walk of a park. In planning terms, this is operationalised through the Master Plan's designation of new neighbourhood parks in areas where the current park distribution is uneven — particularly in the western and northern regions where recent HDB development has proceeded quickly.
For the planning framework that governs where parks and green spaces are allocated, see the archive's piece on Singapore's URA Master Plan. For the relationship between green space and high-density living, see the piece on public spaces and urban density.