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Reviewed: ORTO [2022]


ORTO [2022]


This is ORTO. I'd describe it as a kampungesque rejuvenation extrovert meditation wellness retreat spirit kind of place— plus prawning, tortoises, and bars that operate 5pm-3am.

It so happens that I'm here today for none of those things, but a youth facilitators training event.

In the URA Master Plan 2019, the Urban Redevelopment Authority has plans to redevelop this land to build HDB public housing flats next year. I'd wanted to visit this place at an indeterminate time before that as well, so today is a pleasant coincidence.

Walking the ground, I can't really identify the target demographic of this place. Perhaps "grandparents generation brought kids here so now that those kids are middle aged they feel a community nostalgia", and those people who used to fish by the canals until our national water agency PUB barred the practice.

ORTO seems to be predominantly shared between the privatised paid recreation part, and a new-age-through-yesterday's-lifestyle kampung kampus by non-profit organisation Ground Up Initiative. It doesn't strike me as centrally planned, as much as having become what it is— then a branding group put a visitor map at the entrance and made a website. There's no food here but the Instagram boat noodle bowls, and 5 bars in monopolistic competition. I can't figure why anyone would drink here till midmidnight, but then again I don't visit bars.

Some people are upset that ORTO has been slated for closure. From the perspective of city planning (by someone who isn't a land-use architect), I think that parks should remain as accessible, free, and unpaid locations for unstructured gathering. Thus, this place fails as an inclusive community space, and is greatly in need of urban redevelopment through vertically integrated planning.

However, just as how we pretty much only have one major ice skating rink in whole-of-Singapore, so I think such a place of this concept still deserves to exist as a one-in-its-class. No urban model can quite capture or replicate the rustic and characteristic nature of ORTO, but perhaps it is only in redevelopment that new spaces can be created, for new communities to grow.

I give ORTO three stars.

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