Abstract
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’.
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Data Availability
Raw data from the fieldwork is not publicly available to preserve the research participants’ privacy and confidentiality, under the terms agreed by the NUS IRB (Reference Code S-19-274).
Notes
All informants’ names are pseudonyms for anonymity. Age and gender are indicated in brackets throughout this paper.
Crucial Chinese terms in this paper are highlighted in brackets in hanyu pinyin.
Interestingly, Kim’s acceptance of the administrative duties that came with the leadership role questions to what extent of paperwork serious leisure enthusiasts are amenable to engage in (Stebbins, 2020).
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Acknowledgements
This study was conducted with the approval of the National University of Singapore Institutional Review Board (NUS IRB), and supported by the Asia Research Institute under the Research Fieldwork Grant. The findings and analysis presented in this paper do not reflect the views of NUS, the Ministry of Social and Family Development, or the National Parks Board (NParks), Singapore.
The author would like to thank NParks and the Town Gardeners for their hospitality and cooperation. The author also thanks organizers and participants at the International Conference on Leisure for Older Adults in Asia (January 19-20, 2021), as well as the journal reviewers for their insightful suggestions for this paper.
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Tong, B. Community Building Through Place-Making Activities: Older Landscapers in a Singaporean Residential Town. J Cross Cult Gerontol (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10823-024-09499-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10823-024-09499-5