Reaping the Fruits of Informal Urbanism: An Ethnography of Tactical Gardening in Limassol, Cyprus

Abstract

Research on informal urbanism has shown that certain informal activities are often discouraged or seen as requiring regulation, while others are endorsed by city authorities. An indicative example is guerrilla gardening, the illicit cultivation of someone else's land, usually positively perceived as a form of activism. This article illustrates a case from the Global South where guerrilla gardening poses a threat to public spaces, through examining how it is part of an attempt by home and business owners to spill over their legal boundaries and expand into public spaces around their homes and businesses, most commonly for private gain, sometimes through making those spaces unusable for others. By employing ethnographic research, the article illustrates how plants are being tactically deployed to expand private space into public. It presents results of ethnographic fieldwork in two parts of Limassol, Cyprus, a relatively poor and neglected neighbourhood and the Limassol Marina, an area that has witnessed a rapid – if not rabid – development in the past few years. It illustrates a unique case where informal tactical gardening interventions in public space may exclude community members – sometimes even from using a public space – as opposed to most literature that considers guerrilla gardening as a pathway to producing engaging and sustainable communities. The main contributions of this article lie in the dark side of tactical gardening which is not necessarily resistance oriented.