Chu Kim Duc
Co founder - Executive Director
Think Playgrounds Social Enterprise
Chu Kim Duc graduated from Hanoi Architecture University in Urban Planning in 2003 and earned a Master’s degree in Art History (Jardin historique, patrimoine et paysage) from the École d’Architecture de Versailles in 2007. She and her partner, Nguyen Tieu Quoc Dat founded Think playgrounds in 2014 as a volunteer group to pilot solutions for public spaces friendly for children and promote children’s right to play. In 2016 she registered as executive director of Think playgrounds, officially a Social Enterprise. Until 2025, Think playgrounds worked with artists, partners, communities and local governments to build over 270 public playgrounds in Vietnam, pilot and expand new models of community engaged in renovating friendly, inclusive and ecological public spaces… In 2020, she was named on the list of 100 influential women in the world by the BBC and received the Social Impact Award from Tatler front and female awards in 2025.
Nguyen Tieu Quoc Dat
Co Founder - Creative Director
Think Playgrounds Social Enterprise
With over 15 years of experience in communication, journalism, participatory design, and social development, Nguyen Tieu Quoc Dat is a professional specializing in communication strategy, content creation, public space design, and advocacy for children’s right to play in Vietnam.
He combines a strong background in media production with a deep understanding of community engagement, using storytelling and creative communication to inspire behavioural change and promote inclusive urban development. His participatory design approach ensures that local voices—especially those of children and marginalized groups—are meaningfully involved in shaping playgrounds, community gardens, and shared public spaces. Through his work, he bridges local communities, creative practitioners, the media, and policymakers, contributing to a broader public dialogue on urban biodiversity, the right to play, and regenerative public spaces that support both people and nature.
Nguyen Hue Phuong
Vice Director for Community Program
Think Playgrounds Social Enterprise
Nguyen Hue Phuong is a community development expert with over seventeen years of experience in sustainable development, environmental management, and community-based initiatives. Her work focuses on urban ecology, community gardens, and the creation of inclusive, nature-based public spaces that support biodiversity and social cohesion. Currently, she serves as Deputy Director of the social enterprise Think Playgrounds, where she leads projects on inclusive public spaces, playgrounds, urban gardens, and community-based ecological initiatives. She has strong expertise in project management, community engagement, capacity building, and sustainable practices. She holds bachelor’s degrees in Environmental Economics and Management and in English, has received several international young leaders’ scholarships, and has coordinated national networks on sustainable development and green living in Vietnam.
Community Garden:
Enhancing Urban Biodiversity and Community Cohesion in Vietnam
In Vietnam’s rapidly urbanizing cities, public spaces are increasingly shaped by concrete development, while native ecosystems and everyday relationships between people and nature are often overlooked. In response, Think Playgrounds has partnered with local communities to develop community gardens as regenerative public spaces that enhance urban biodiversity, social inclusion, and community well-being.
Implemented in densely populated residential areas and along the Red River bank, Think Playgrounds has developed ten community gardens that transform neglected spaces into shared ecological environments. Due to extremely high land values in Hanoi, most gardens are necessarily small in scale, which limits their direct ecological impact. However, these gardens function as living prototypes, demonstrating how even modest spaces can contribute to biodiversity, environmental awareness, and community cohesion when thoughtfully designed and collectively managed.
Designed through participatory processes, the gardens prioritize native and adaptive plant species, nature-based practices, and low-impact materials. Women often lead garden management, drawing on their horticultural knowledge, while volunteers, and students—particularly from international schools—play important supporting roles. Many successful models rely heavily on volunteer engagement, as local communities often face economic and time pressures that limit their capacity to proactively sustain such initiatives without external support.
Beyond community gardens, riverbank areas represent a rare and significant opportunity for large-scale ecological regeneration within the city. These spaces hold strong potential for reconnecting urban residents with nature and advocating for ecological waterfronts across Vietnamese cities. However, increasing urban development pressure—such as large-scale landscape and infrastructure projects—poses serious challenges. In response, Think Playgrounds is strengthening collaboration with local authorities to embed ecological public space pilots into broader municipal innovation and urban development programs.
By integrating community resources, ecological restoration, and cross-sector partnerships, Think Playgrounds’ community garden and riverbank nature regeneration models demonstrate pathways toward biodiversity-rich, inclusive, and resilient urban futures.
Keywords
Native plants, Community Efforts, Multidisciplinary approach, urban biodiversity, Inclusion
Cai Bingyu
Kampung Architect
Ground-Up Initiative (GUI)
Bingyu leads Ground-Up Initiative (GUI), a Singapore-based non-profit that reconnects people with the Earth, with one another, and with self. Working closely with a dedicated community of volunteers, partners, and everyday heroes, he helps shape spaces rooted in belonging, sustainability, and hands-on culture. GUI’s home, the Kampung Kampus, is a living learning campus where communities grow food, regenerate soil, reimagine waste, and rediscover care for place. For over 17 years, GUI has championed a ground-up spirit, using urban gardening and collective making to build empathy, resilience, and shared responsibility through learning, doing, and growing together.
Bingyu leads Ground-Up Initiative (GUI), a Singapore-based non-profit that reconnects people with the Earth, with one another, and with self. Working closely with a dedicated community of volunteers, partners, and everyday heroes, he helps shape spaces rooted in belonging, sustainability, and hands-on culture. GUI’s home, the Kampung Kampus, is a living learning campus where communities grow food, regenerate soil, reimagine waste, and rediscover care for place. For over 17 years, GUI has championed a ground-up spirit, using urban gardening and collective making to build empathy, resilience, and shared responsibility through learning, doing, and growing together.
Beyond Farming:
Culture-Building as Urban Social Infrastructure
As cities grow denser in an increasingly hyper-connected world, we paradoxically become more disconnected from one another, particularly across social, cultural, and economic differences. This presentation reflects on the work of Ground-Up Initiative (GUI) in Singapore, focusing on how social permeability is cultivated through intentional culture-building rather than through farming alone. At GUI, urban farming, gardening, composting, and reimagining waste function as platforms where people of different ages, professions, nationalities, and life experiences encounter one another as equals.
What sustains these encounters, however, is not technical expertise, productivity, or outputs, but a carefully cultivated culture. This includes shared labour, everyday rituals, openness to participation, and an ethic of care that gently suspends hierarchy and invites trust, vulnerability, and mutual responsibility. Over time, strangers return not only to tend soil, but to tend relationships.
Drawing from GUI’s 17-year practice and the development of its Kampung Kampus, I examine how encounters are intentionally designed, held, and repeated, allowing relational connections to deepen across difference. The presentation concludes with reflections on building people rather than programmes, and on culture as quiet social infrastructure. In a city shaped by efficiency and outsourcing, GUI suggests that connection must be practiced, patiently grown through ordinary, imperfect acts of shared care together.
Keywords
Participation, Belonging
Aiko EGUCHI
Founder and Representative, EDIBLE WAY
Assistant Professor, Center for Preventive Medical Sciences, Chiba University
Aiko is a researcher and practitioner focusing on edible landscape practices. After graduating from the Department of Architecture at Musashino Art University, she worked at architectural design firms. She completed her master’s and doctoral degrees at the Graduate School of Horticulture, Chiba University.
In 2016, she launched EDIBLE WAY as a project of the Isami Kinoshita Lab. EDIBLE WAY has received the Good Design Award (2017) and the SEED + PACIFIC RIM Award, Honorable Mention (2018).
She is currently a Project Assistant Professor at the Center for Preventive Medical Sciences, Chiba University. Her research interests focus on the relationships between people, gardening, and well-being.
Isami KINOSHITA
Prof. Emeritus
Chiba University
Isami Kinoshita has been engaging in research & education and also practice in the field of community design, urban-& rural planning and landscape Architecture. He studied Architecture at the Tokyo Institute of Technology and obtained a PhD. He is one of pioneer to introduce workshop method in the field of urban planning.
His selected books are Workshop (in Japanese), Gakugei. 2007,
Social Capital for a Child-Friendly City Housing, Streets, and Parks, Routledge, 2025
Children’s Community Design Pattern Language, Kajima Publisher, 2023, et.A.
EDIBLE WAY:
Perforating the City at a Micro Scale through Edible Landscape Practices
This presentation examines how urban gardening can cultivate social permeability through EDIBLE WAY (EW) project, edible landscape developed in Japanese residential neighborhoods. Edible landscapes are understood not merely as tools for greening or beautification, but as spatial and social mediators that connect people with one another and with place. In Japan, however, implementing edible landscapes in public spaces remains challenging due to concerns over management responsibility, safety, and perceptions of the privatization of public space.
In response to these conditions, EW began its activities by placing planter bags containing vegetables in front of participating residents' houses along streets. This presentation traces the process through three phases: small-scale planter cultivation along private roadside spaces, expansion into sidewalks, and the ongoing development of planting strips and public green spaces along pedestrian corridors.
Focusing on edible landscape practices and plant-mediated intergenerational communication, this presentation highlights collaborative rule-making, tolerance, and learning-oriented spaces as key elements of the project. These processes create micro-perforations in existing social and spatial boundaries, enabling more open and inclusive relationships to emerge. The case of EW demonstrates how gradual, relational approaches to urban gardening can perforate the city at a micro scale and enhance social permeability through everyday encounters.
Keywords
Edible landscapes, Urban gardening, Citizen participation, Community-based practice, Urban commoning
Joanne Mun
Chair and Community Lead
Kebun-Kebun Bangsar
Joanne is an Architect-Urbanist with over 20 years of experience in Urban Design, Master Planning, and Architecture across Australia and Malaysia. Returning to Malaysia in 2015, she served as a Community Architect at Think City, leading projects that revitalised public spaces and strengthened communities. At Kebun-Kebun Bangsar, she drives initiatives that empower underserved groups, foster volunteer engagement, and promote environmental and social change. Her work spans practice, planning, and non-profit leadership, earning recognition as one of Wiki Impact’s 2022 Malaysia’s 100 Changemakers. Joanne continues to advance design, placemaking, and social innovation as catalysts for community transformation.
Kebun-Kebun Bangsar:
A Garden of Hope
Kebun-Kebun Bangsar is a community farm and urban park in the heart of Kuala Lumpur that has transformed underused urban land into a living classroom, a sanctuary, and a hub for connection. Since its establishment in 2017, the garden has become a space where children, young people, volunteers, and underserved communities engage in hands-on learning, from planting and tending crops to raising animals and caring for the environment. These activities foster ecological awareness, social responsibility, and a sense of shared purpose.
Beyond its gardens, Kebun-Kebun Bangsar amplifies its impact through advocacy, storytelling, and publications, documenting lessons learned and sharing inspiration with the wider community. Through permaculture workshops, volunteer programmes, and community engagement, the garden demonstrates that urban farming does more than grow food: it nurtures relationships, strengthens local ecosystems, and empowers people to take action.
Kebun-Kebun Bangsar exemplifies how small, intentional actions can transform urban spaces into inclusive, resilient, and vibrant communities. The garden invites audiences to imagine cities not merely as concrete landscapes, but as places where nature, knowledge, and human connection coexist, demonstrating how ordinary people and community initiatives can drive extraordinary change.
Keywords
Permaculture, Biophilic Design, Community Engagement, Urban Land Reuse, Nature-based Solutions
Myungjin Shin
Researcher
Environmental Planning Institute, Seoul National University
Myungjin Shin, Ph.D is a researcher at the Environmental Planning Institute, Seoul National University, whose work focuses on the agency of the community in the built environment and their authentic experiences. Combining her backgrounds in art history, aesthetics and landscape theory, Myungjin has been exploring the urban landscape practices in North America and South Korea, publishing on a wide range of topics that include community gardens, citizen participation, urban history, regional tourism and planning, public art, and cultural landscapes. In addition to her research, Myungjin also teaches, writes, translates, and facilitates community projects on on-going basis.
Cases from Daegu and Daejeon:
Emergent Community Gardens in Metropolitan Cities
This research explores cases from Daegu and Daejeon, two metropolitan cities in South Korea, to explore the emergence of community-based gardens in relation to their management structures. Both cases share a similar geographical background; located near the mountain parks developed under Japanese imperialists, they have experienced relative underdevelopment and neglect in recent decades. With development projects stalling, each community has sought ways to use the unoccupied land for gardening purposes.
In the case of Daegu, the Dalseong-Toseong Alleygarden is considered the representative community project nationwide. With a strong governing structure involving the community, local government, seniors club and local institutions, gardens become a basis for necessary infrastructural developments. In the case of Daejeon’s Daeheung-dong, however, while formal oversight or governance is lacking, what has emerged is an informal urban agricultural network. As old residents leave the area, remaining residents rent the unoccupied lots for gardening and create an urban agricultural neighborhood. The comparison of two cases demonstrates 1) how the geographical background and urban policy have created a condition for the emergence of community-based gardens, and 2) how the management and governance structure can pave a varying path for such cases.
Keywords
Informal community, urban agriculture, alleygarden, urban regeneration
Yoshiki Mishima
Founding Director
FOLK, Inc.
Yoshiki Mishima is a landscape architect and founding director of FOLK, Inc., based in Tokyo. His research and practice investigate how landscapes can serve as platforms for collective care, cultural continuity, and local autonomy. Engaging with both contemporary ecological challenges and vernacular civil engineering knowledge, he works across diverse contexts—from urban Tokyo to shrinking rural towns.
Mishima holds an MLA from Harvard GSD, previously practiced at MVVA in New York, and taught at the University of Tokyo. His work has been recognized with awards including the Green City Award Prime Minister’s Award and the Japanese Institute of Landscape Architecture Award.
Perforating the City through Collective Gardening:
Shimokita Engei-bu and the Practice of Social Permeability
This presentation introduces Shimokita Engei-bu, a community-based horticultural initiative in Tokyo, as a case through which to examine how urban gardening practices can facilitate social permeability across diverse actors and everyday urban life.
Located along a former railway corridor in Shimokitazawa, Shimokita Engei-bu operates not as a conventional park or community garden, but as an evolving commons where residents, passersby, shop owners, students, and practitioners encounter one another through shared acts of planting, tending, and maintenance. Gardening here functions less as a programmatic activity and more as a spatial and social interface—lowering thresholds for participation and enabling encounters among people who might not otherwise meet.
Drawing from this case, the presentation reflects on how participatory horticulture can “perforate” the city by creating porous spaces of engagement between strangers, different generations, and varied social backgrounds. The project foregrounds slow, adaptive processes shaped by local knowledge, seasonal rhythms, and collective care, rather than fixed design outcomes or top-down management models.
By situating Shimokita Engei-bu alongside other Japanese examples of community-led greening and the reuse of pre-modern environmental practices, the presentation highlights both the challenges and opportunities of cultivating social bonds through landscape. It concludes by proposing urban gardening as a critical spatial practice for fostering relational connections and shared responsibility within contemporary cities.
Keywords
Shimokita Engei-bu, worker's co-op, commons, urban ecogies, social capital
Tessa Maria Guazon
Head Curator and Associate Professor
Jorge Vargas Museum and Filipiniana Research Center/Department of Art Studies, University of the Philippines Diliman
Tessa Maria Guazon is the head curator of the University of the Philippines Jorge Vargas Museum and Filipiniana Research Center. She has done fieldwork and research in Thailand, Indonesia, Japan, Singapore, and South Korea. She was a researcher-in-residence at the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum in Japan in 2017, and more recently, at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Seoul. She has curated exhibitions in the Philippines and overseas, notably the 2021 Asian Art Biennial in Taiwan, and the Philippine Pavilion at the Venice Art Biennale in 2018. Her essays have been published in anthologies, journals, exhibition catalogues, and monographs.
Gardening as assembly:
A university museum garden as a site of learning and gathering
The UP Jorge Vargas Museum and Filipiniana Research Center (the UP Vargas Museum, hereafter) launched its social practice project "Gardens and Homesteads" in 2024. Our utility staff began cultivating vegetables in a small plot behind the museum during the 2019 pandemic. It eventually grew to a modest plot, yielding several harvests every month. Construction workers at a nearby site began harvesting from the vegetable plots, too, and the museum's utility staff and guards would often have arguments with them. This minor altercation had me asking: "Who owns the garden, anyway?"
The social practice project Gardens and Homesteads reflects on the idea of property. What does it mean for property to be communal and shared, publicly sanctioned, or privately managed? It references the idea behind the Manila case study for the Southeast Asia Neighborhoods research: neighborhoods beyond property. The project revolves around the museum collection, its archives, and public programs. We activate all three in our garden, proposing it as a space for learning, conversation, and most especially, dreaming. Art institutions, such as university museums like the Vargas, can expand their spaces for learning towards sites where assemblies and collectivities can form.
Keywords
University Museums, property, gardens, assemblies, collectivities
Areeya Tivasuradej
Research assistant
The Regional Center for Social Science and Sustainable Development (RCSD), Chiang Mai University
Areeya is an interpreter and research assistant in geography under the Safeguarding Carbon and Biodiversity across European Forest Ecosystems through Multi-actor Innovation (FORbEST) project at The Regional Center for Social Science and Sustainable Development (RCSD), Chiang Mai University.
Turning an Urban Landfill into a Garden with a female Akha grower in northern Thailand
The Chiang Mai Urban Farm, located by the bank of a highly polluted waterway where many marginalized migrants and urban poor reside, emerged atop a landfill during the COVID19 pandemic in mid-2020. The initiative, led by a group of community-driven and nature-based architects, aimed to provide a growing space, fresh vegetables, employment opportunities, a learning platform, a distribution channel for the municipality’s waste-turned-compost, and leisure space. Through ethnography and keeping Donna Haraway's slogan of "Making Kin, Not Babies" in mind, a female indigenous Akha grower became my teacher on how to notice the entangled relationships of plants and landfill while rooting against styrofoam, plastics and ants. She showed me that nourishing vegetables included knowing how to eat certain popular greens and flowers among diaspora indigenous Akha eaters, yet deemed too old and too yellow for the aesthetic greenery. As she cared for her children while getting accustomed herself as an urban employed gardener, I learned to recognize how urban gardening and environmentalism occlude state territorialization and exclusion of indigenous peoples in Thailand. These encounters took place while the architects and gardeners attempted to take the rare chance during the pandemic to shape and reclaim the municipal public land.
Keywords
Landfill, multi-actor collaboration, indigenous, environmentalism, Thailand
Lau Hoi Lung, Johnny
PhD in Geography and Resource Management
The Chinese University of Hong Kong
Lau Hoi Lung, Johnny is an activist-scholar recently completed his doctoral research in the Chinese University of Hong Kong. The findings and connections form the thesis ”Farming for More than Food: Constructing Community Resilience through Urban Agriculture in Hong Kong” are further practiced in collaborations with leisure farms, community gardens and edible campuses. Through cultivating in his home farm, the exploration of urban agriculture continues as an active member of the civil society and a father of two. We will find the way together by sowing the seeds of hope for our families, communities, and cities.
New farm development:
Making of “new territories” in urban Hong Kong
New town development is often praised for building the financial success of Hong Kong. The fertile soils in the New Territories were colonized and urbanized through satellite cities, new towns, and new development areas. Despite the diminishing space for cultivation, farms have been evolving under urban challenges and actively perforating the city to form a “network of resilience” through community agriculture. People are self-motivated to farm for multiple purposes diverging from the governmental narrative, in which “modern” agriculture is emphasized to maximize farm yield on minimal land.
This report starts with an overview of the evolution of community farming alongside the urbanization of Hong Kong. The “rural” was not a passive land reserve but was vibrantly transforming urbanites and producing bountiful gardens all over the city. The second part is a case study of a new farm development around my home on the urban fringe. Starting from a home garden of 50 m² to a registered farm of 2,000 m², the farm also served as a base supporting urban community resilience projects in adversities such as social unrest and the COVID-19 pandemic. The complexity and diversity of the actors in urban farming is further discussed through a framework of place-people-plants.
Keywords
Urban agriculture, community resilience, home garden, urban-rural symbiosis