Dubai, United Arab Emirates (CNN)– Finding green space is a huge challenge in any city, not to mention the most densely populated city in the world. In the Downtown district of Singapore, anyone looking for a new park to picnic in might need to look up at the sky.
In the recently completed CapitaSpring Tower, a glass facade reveals plants and trees that grow hundreds of feet above the ground.
Pedestrians and office workers can take an elevator that leads to what is known as the “Green Oasis”.
The CapitaSpring is 280 meters high and is currently one of the tallest skyscrapers in the Asian country.
You will of course find more things that will interest you above the oasis.
On the upper level of the building, visitors can stroll the 4,500-square-foot rooftop farm, which provides edible fruits, vegetables, herbs and flowers for three on-site restaurants.
During CNN’s visit to the building, a farmer explained that the park produces between 70 and 100 kilograms of produce per month.
The 51-storey building houses more than 80,000 trees and plants in 90,000 square feet of green space.
According to the Danish firm Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG), which designed the tower in collaboration with Carlo Ratti Associati, most of the plant species found across the site are native to Singapore and thus adapt to the heat and humidity year-round.
CapitaSpring is among the many nature-related buildings that have opened in Singapore’s Downtown Core in recent years.
The Parkroyal Collection Pickering is just a few blocks away and has more than 160,000 square feet of green space, with a series of balconies filled with trees and plants.
Less than a mile to the south, the exterior of the Oasia is slowly turning green, its facade being colonized by more than 20 species of reptiles and vines.
The Singapore government has long promoted itself as a “garden city”, a term popularly applied by its founding father and former prime minister, Lee Kuan Yew, in the 1960s.
In the decades that followed, planners cemented this in city-wide tree-planting programs and landscaping projects in its vast public housing complexes.
The state is also requiring private property developers to allocate green spaces when building new skyscrapers.
The Urban Redevelopment Authority of Singapore hopes to turn the business district, which can be eerily quiet during evenings and weekends, into what it calls a “vibrant 24-hour business district”.
Therefore, officials offered owners of existing buildings incentives to convert the structures into mixed-use projects, attached to recreational facilities.