A living library, rooted in the ground beneath us.
This is where research meets story and where soil knowledge finds a home.
What Is This Place?
The Living Soil Asia Research Website is a living library, a place where research and stories, observations and data, lived experience and scientific inquiry sit alongside one another. Like the soil it documents, this is a place that grows and evolves over time.
We believe that soil knowledge belongs to everyone. Rather than keep it centralised or demarcated, we gather it here, make it accessible, and share it widely. The insights on this site emerge from gardens across Singapore and the broader Asian region, shaped by the many hands that have helped build it.
How To Use This Site
This library can be entered in many ways. You may follow a guided pathway, wander through stories from the field, or explore the full breadth of what we have gathered.
We invite you to move slowly, follow your curiosity, and return often as the library continues to grow.
The site is organised into four interconnected spaces:
Learning Trails
Guided pathways into different themes, questions, and areas of practice, designed to offer a more curated journey into the library.
Stories
Narratives and reflections from our team, collaborators, and community — where knowledge is shared through personal stories and lived experience.
Knowledge Hub
The full living archive of Living Soil Asia. This is where everything comes together: our research outputs, raw data, presentations, field notes, articles, how-to guides, and stories all in one evolving collection.
Community Resources
A wider library of external community resources, videos, research papers, books, and external materials that support deeper learning and exploration.
Rooted In Singapore.
Growing Beyond.
Living Soil Asia is part of the Foodscape Collective ecosystem and emerged from the work and research of the Soil Regeneration Project. Our work is built on three pillars, with this website focused on our Research Pillar.
Research
Community-led action research on soil regeneration practices and outcomes.
Education
Talks, workshops, and curriculum for schools, communities, and corporations.
Culture
Gatherings and creative programmes that nurture regenerative ways of being.
Our wider vision is to help build and sustain a balanced ecosystem built on equity, care and regenerative ways of being. Fostering values of community, care, inclusivity, regeneration, and intersectionality. Visit our main website to learn more.
Community-led Action Research
The research at the heart of this site is not conducted about communities, it is conducted with them. Community-led Action Research work specifies one that specifies research that builds bottom-up and horizontal forms of organising, undertaken and led by communities working for their own benefit. In this process, gardeners, urban farmers, and soil stewards become co-researchers and co-storytellers. The research is grounded in vocabulary and practices of the people, not of institutions.
Our past research was a three-year collaborative project with the National Parks Board of Singapore, titled the Soil Regeneration Project, studying how regenerative practices transform soil health in community gardens. We ask: what are experienced regenerative gardeners actually doing? How do soil properties change over time? And how can the qualitative stories gardeners be combined with what the data shows to explain the whole picture?
At present, we research and educate not only on regenerative practices in soil, but on regenerative practices in life as a whole. How can our learnings from the soil feed into our wider ways of life? Together, in community, we grow and share our understanding and knowledge.
How We Work
Our research is shaped by five principles — guiding not only what we study, but how we show up in the process.
Holistic & Transdisciplinary
We draw together ecology, anthropology, education, and lived experience, holding them alongside one another rather than flattening them into a single lens.
Emergent & Iterative
We begin with questions, not conclusions. The research unfolds in response to what the land and the community teach us.
Nature-Centred
The soil is not a resource to be studied at arm's length. It is a living world we are part of, and our methodology reflects that.
Enquiry-Led Experiential Learning
Learning happens in the doing: in the garden, in the field, in the act of observing.
Community-Based Citizen Science
The people who tend Singapore's community gardens are experts in their own right. We document their knowledge, build on it, and share it back.
The People Nurturing
The Ground
The Living Soil Asia research team is a small, dedicated group of educators, researchers, fieldworkers, and creatives brought together by a shared conviction that soil health is inseparable from community health. We work intentionally and in close relationship with the gardens and the people we research alongside.
To meet each of us more fully, visit our team page on the main Living Soil Asia site.