Sustainability through intervention: a case study of guerrilla gardening in Kingston, Ontario

Abstract

The purpose of our paper is to provide an in-depth look at guerrilla gardening as an example of sustainability in action. Through participatory action research methods that triangulate content analysis, 16 semi-structured interviews and researcher logs, two case studies were developed. The first was of Dig Kingston, a guerrilla gardening project and the second of the Oak Street Community Garden, both located in Kingston Ontario. The focus of the research was on guerrilla gardening, while the community gardening case was used for contrast and to deepen our analysis. Key themes that emerged from our case research included expression, intervention and spatial manipulation. Our main findings present a deeper understanding of guerrilla gardening as well as an analysis on the relationship between space and sustainability. In particular our paper lays the groundwork for how interventions, like guerrilla gardening, open up unexpected and non-normative possibilities for conceptualising sustainability. These themes contribute to current understandings of sustainability by illustrating how a localised action that operates outside of spatial expectations, in this case guerrilla gardening, is a powerful pathway towards producing engaging and sustainable communities. Thus, our paper contributes to the growing body of literature on open, reflexive and critical models of sustainability.