Environmental Injustice in Cities (2) – Access to Green Spaces in Singapore

 

Good to see you back! πŸ™‚

I’ll be presenting some of my own findings today.Β 

Social issues like racism and income disparity still exist in Singapore. AΒ study showed that although about 3 quarters of the 2000 surveyed Singaporeans supported equal treatment of all races, actual instances of racism were common.

As for income inequality, Singapore had a Gini coefficient of 0.417 in 2018, relatively lower than in other developed countries. However, another study done on the Commitment to Reducing Inequality Index (CRI) highlighted Singapore’s lack of efforts in reducing inequality – Singapore ranked 149 out of 157 countries.

With Singapore’s history of ethnic zoning and urban greening efforts, I wondered if any of these could have caused environmental injustice issues that still exist today.

I decided to document the accessibility of green spaces (parks, nature reserves, and open spaces) for residential communities in Singapore, to investigate if poorer districts had less access (highlighted in some cities in last week’s post).

I used Property Guru, a widely used real estate website, to collect data. I collected the prices and names of the most and least expensive residences in all 28 residential districts and documented the number of green spaces within a 15-minute walk for every residence. If you’re interested in the actual figures, this spreadsheet shows the ranked (most to least expensive) and unranked data collected.

When ranked, data showed that there was no relation between how expensive an estate was (represented by the prices of its most and least expensive residences) and accessibility to green spaces. For example, the Tanglin / Holland / Bukit Timah district with the most expensive residence of all (100 million SGD), shared the same number of nearby green spaces (3) as the Macpherson / Potong Pasir district which had the least expensive residence of all (215 000 SGD).

Figure (created with Google sheets).

The unranked results, however, showed that a majority (52%) of districts had greater accessibility (increase) for the least expensive as compared to the most expensive residences, within districts. 7 out of 27 districts showed equal accessibility (no change).

These findings, when put together, could be explained by a study that showed that Singapore had low park provision and green cover (similar to other cities) – mainly due to its growing population and lack of space to create more green spaces. Although overall distribution may be equal, cheaper residences (mostly HDBs) tend to serve more residents, thus more green spaces may have been created nearer these residences to serve them.

Although my findings were unable to highlight environmental injustice in terms of access to urban green spaces, other studies have highlighted this. One showed that older and poorer residents were less likely to use these spaces due to remoteness. Thus, my study could be extended to investigate green space per capita and price per area, which may have been better representations of access and average prices.

Green spaces are essential, especially to Singapore, where high stress levels and hot weather contribute to unhappiness and health problems. My hope is that urban green spaces in Singapore will work towards serving all equally.

– Hope πŸ™‚

5 thoughts on “Environmental Injustice in Cities (2) – Access to Green Spaces in Singapore

  1. Hi Hope! I found your research experiment very interesting. Although your findings were unable to highlight environmental injustice here in Singapore, the results could be looked at from another perspective. Your findings could reflect how well Singapore has planned the locations of both residential areas and green spaces to ensure that Singaporeans have adequate access to such areas.

    If the same environmental injustice experiment were to be replicated in the context of another country, how different do you think the results would be and what are the implications of the experiment producing such results? I would love to hear your thoughts!

    1. Hi Sarah-Ann!
      Yes, I do believe it could reflect careful planning by the government, but I think the data collected in my short study is insufficient and not comprehensive enough to prove that for now. Maybe one day I’ll be able to study this in greater detail!

      In response to your question, my previous post on heat events & green spaces actually highlighted the results from a study done on this topic in America! It showed that lower income communities and people of colour have access to much smaller parks than those that white Americans have access to. This definitely reflects the unequal access to beneficial green spaces, and if you’d like to know more, the details are explained in the post!

      That being said, I do wonder what the results would be like if this study was done in other countries other than the USA, and I think it would be vastly different for every country.
      – Hope πŸ™‚

  2. Hi Hope,

    This post is a real standout. I’m thrilled to see a student take her own initiative & approach to asking a research Q and explaining it all so well.

    That said, I’m not sure I agree with your decision to do the research this way (though that in no way influences my super favourable impression of this post). Let me explain.

    Correct me if I’m wrong, but you ID’d the priciest & cheapest estate in each district, then you counted how many green spaces a resident of each one could walk to within 15 minutes. I’m curious as to why you did that instead of counting all green spaces in each district and then looking for a relationship with avg price of a dwelling or avg household income ?

    Of course, this is just my opinion and I’m not saying what you did was wrong – just I’m not sure I agree with the approach.

    I also have an alternate Q to propose. Is there a relationship between affluence & QUALITY of green spaces that residents have access to ? Specifically, do more affluent residents live closer to more naturalised parks and nature reserves ? I’m not saying you must or even should investigate this Q, just that I’m wondering about that and whether you think this Q matters.

    Another tool you might find interesting is Treepedia – SG is one of the cities whose street trees have been censused for this project http://senseable.mit.edu/treepedia

    Again, you should be very proud of yourself for having done something so sophisticated. What a joy to read ! And thanks for citing this new paper from SG – I always love Dan Richards’ work but I hadn’t seen this study.

    jc

    jc

    jc

    1. Hi Dr Coleman!
      Firstly, thank you for your very kind & encouraging words! :”)

      In response to your first question, the reason why I chose to do it this way is because I had an idea that Singapore has quite an even distribution of parks islandwide, and the studies I read (as mentioned in the post) noted this. Although they showed that park provision was low, since I have no access to data on population density in Singapore’s residences, I decided I couldn’t do a study on park provision either.

      Thus, I wanted to investigate something that was “less investigated” by exploring the possibility of unequal access WITHIN districts. I also felt that using averages would not be able to represent very low/high prices as I realised that many districts in Singapore were not uniformly more or less expensive – many “cheaper” districts also had a few very expensive residences.

      In response to your second question, yes! I do think this matters. When I was doing this study, I realised that the reason why some residences had access to a lower number of parks may have been because of the larger size and better quality of the parks. Some examples included the Macritche Reservoir Park and the Bishan-AMK Park. I was unable to analyse this further, however, due to time constraints. In the case of Macritche, from observation, I do know that the closest residences are terrace houses (Macritche Park is right at their doorstep). These are generally residences the more affluent live in. I do hope to explore this further in the future!

      Thank you also for sharing the Treepedia link, Dr Coleman! It was very interesting to view the green view index of SG and many other cities.

      – Hope πŸ™‚

  3. Thanks for your reply to my questions, Hope – I understand better now why you made this decision.

    I think I need to revise my understanding of spatial income stratification in SG. For example, I thought that districts, such as Bukit Timah or Sentosa are mainly, if not almost exclusively, inhabited by the elites. So then, I was thinking about specifically access to BTNR among those people. But maybe you’re right and it’s less cut and dried than I thought. You also make a very good point about the distribution of parks.

    I think there’s room for further, related investigations (e.g., by an FYP or grad student) in SG & potential to compare with other cities in affluent nations.

    jc

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *