Community Building Through Place-Making Activities: Older Landscapers in a Singaporean Residential Town

This paper explores how some older residents in B Town, a residential estate in northern Singapore, engage in community building through their ‘serious leisure’ and ‘devotee work’ participation in a resident landscaper program. Using data from ethnographic fieldwork conducted from February to November 2020 with participants aged from 60 to 81, I analyze how they built connections with each other, and the wider B Town community, through their participation. Particularly, I examine how the shared identity marker of being former farmers in now-evicted kampungs (villages) before the 1980s drew them together, and informed their continued involvement as resident landscapers. The ‘kampung spirit’ that they built up through the program enabled the construction of not only social connections, but also exclusionary mechanisms that prevented more older adults from engaging in the activities. These findings highlight participants’ agency, and complicate static and/or monolithic conceptualizations of ‘aging in place/the community’ and ‘active aging’.