Guerrilla Gardening Research Articles

Reflections on the production of space and justice: A study of everyday life of the SuoJincun's guerrilla gardeners

As a country that legally guarantees equal access to public space for all residents, China still faces the challenge of abstract public power impeding socio-spatial production and the realization of spatial justice. The article focuses on two case studies of community guerrilla gardening in Nanjing. It employs ethnographic research methods to analyze the green grassroots actions carried out by residents in the community and to demonstrate the differentiated representational spatial production of the residents. The results show that: gardening has an irreplaceable social acquisition value as the production of real matter, is a material carrier and bond of place attachment, and a means of shaping cultural identity. It contains the potential for creative gardening methods and is an important node of access to nature and culture for groups with limited mobility. Guerrilla gardening recycling of collective space by residents in the form of private appropriation. The discussion session analyzes the positive side of the phenomenon of resident's privatization of common public space from the perspectives of social change, the value of use of public space, and spatial justice. The concludes by moving away from the discussion of public and private space toward an everyday, use-value-driven, locally creative initiative for a new aesthetics of collective space.

Guerrilla Gardening in a Time of Ecological and Social Crisis: An Exploratory Endeavor to Feel Connected with a Lost Piece of Forest

This four-year explorative study is located in a nearby forest, or more accurately a clearcut, in the western part of Sweden. The objective is to contribute to existing knowledge about forest gardening by exploring a forest milieu without trees in the Northern Hemisphere where the conditions are poor. The aim is to support biodiversity in the short term and to find out whether we could cultivate root vegetables, potatoes, and summer flowers in this nutrient-poor and shadowless environment. The study has an eco-philosophical approach that promotes eco-pedagogy and environmental education and a pragmatic pedagogical approach that adopts a "learning-by-doing" belief. The exploration is underpinned by collaborative autoethnography, and the research is conducted in and through practice. The findings show that a planting project in a clearcut requires a lot of preparation and planning and that it is possible to use a clearcut to grow potatoes, peas, and some summer flowers without special efforts, but hard to grow other crops such as vegetables and root vegetables. The project implies that the planting activities in a clearcut may have a deep impact on people’s sense of human-nature identity and respect for the natural environment.

Guerrilla Gardening: At the Intersection of Birnam Wood and Minneapolis

ABSTRACT To reflect on guerrilla gardening and the narratives sprouting from it, I intersect a literary work – the New Zealand writer Eleanor Catton’s novel Birnam Wood, published in 2023, loosely based on Shakespeare’s Macbeth—with descriptions of gardens at sites of police killings in the greater Minneapolis metro area. I argue that guerrilla garden infrastructures sprout in the soil of highly unequal power, often in the wake of the fatal exercise of state power, and usually in the shadow of a foreshortened environmental future. They are DIY infrastructures, constructed by people weathering the breakdowns inherent to entwined environmental, political, and economic crises in the 21st century.

The urban political ecology of the commons or commoning as a socio-natural process: The case of the Peri-Urban Gardening group in Thessaloniki

This paper casts the foundations for the development of an urban political ecology of the commons, drawing on the case of a guerrilla gardening initiative in Thessaloniki, Greece. In doing so, it draws on the literature of urban political ecology and its ontological and epistemological underpinnings and argues for a reconceptualisation of urban commoning as a socio-natural, productive process. Understanding commoning as inherently socio-natural, the product of discursive and material practices, opens new horizons for both academic research and activist engagement in efforts to imagine and build alternative urban futures. The commoning practices of the Peri-Urban Gardening Group of Karatassou, in Thessaloniki, serve as a heuristic case study for the development of a holistic methodological framework that uncovers the equal significance of discursive and material commoning practices and processes.

“I walk, I see, I do”: A more-than human perspective on urban gardening

This article tells the story of how Tallinn urban gardener Anton turned from community gardening to guerrilla gardening. While both gardening types have recently been critically studied focusing on the tension between cooperation with or a rebellious act against neoliberal urban governance regimes, this paper investigates the topic from a more-than-human theory perspective. Building on Anton's practitioner memoirs and in-depth interviews with city officials and gardening activists, the paper emphasizes the role of materialities, encounters and emotions involved in governing and practicing urban gardening in Tallinn. In exposing the case, it shows how strong emotions driving early community gardening experiments elicited the institutionalization of a more controlled governance model for community gardening. This subsequently fostered an alienation of the first-generation community gardening activist from the gardens, in particular Anton, who consequently turned towards guerrilla gardening. Looking at this process from a more-than-human perspective allows us to paint a nuanced and interwoven picture of urban gardening without diminishing the actions undertaken as a mere opposition to the status quo.

Plantifa: Antifascist Guerrilla Gardening Curriculum

This paper suggests that an anti-fascist guerilla gardening (Plantifa) curriculum offers unique educational opportunities in the form of wholesome, and much needed, praxis. Utilizing anti-fascist (Bray, 2017), decolonizing (Tuck et al., 2014), and eco-justice frameworks (Shiva, 2015), Plantifa presents community activism that connects people with place, history, permaculture, and subversion of hegemony. In the context of education, a Plantifa curriculum offers learners to be immersed with their communities and local ecosystems, beyond mere classroom walls. It is a process of mapping local terrain and history, identifying non-invasive plants and suitable locations, considering food-bearing plants for community needs, as well as the afterward tasks of watering and nurturing. Questions of, "Why is 'democracy' as we understand and practice limited to humans, and who, what, or where ought to be included in a democracy?"; “Is planting local flora legally or ethically wrong?” and “Why is anti-fascism important to our community and our eco-system?” are just some of the questions learners can consider during this process of eco-revanchism. Ultimately, we are connecting wholeheartedly with the anti-fascist movement all over the world by appropriating their acronym (Antifa) with deference as a way to plant seeds of love against hierarchies. We are Plantifa!

Without permission: guerrilla gardening, contested places, spatial justice

ABSTRACT This article examines the guerilla garden as a contested space of knowledge and a means of (re)composing urban landscapes. Guerilla gardening is the radical transformation of public property for illicit cultivation. As a practice, it involves individuals or groups of people transforming public and private spaces of neglect through the planting of crops or decorative plants. The purpose is to (re)compose decaying or unproductive spaces into sites of resilience and fecundity as a practice of spatial justice.

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

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.

Guerrilla gardening as normalised law-breaking: Challenges to land ownership and aesthetic order

This article considers guerrilla gardening that involves taking on other people’s land for gardening, usually without their permission. It is a practice that is overlooked largely by criminology, yet it can tell us something about attitudes to law and land ownership and challenges the approved aesthetic order of where we live. It can soften the look and feel of the city, leading to a different emotional and affective interaction with urbanity. Evidence is presented from a qualitative study of guerrilla gardeners from the North West of England. The discussion is informed theoretically by work on aesthetic criminology, do-it-yourself and temporary urbanism and the idea of urban commons. In this study, guerrilla gardening is found to be a normalised form of law-breaking that, despite not necessarily being to everyone’s taste and the gardeners having an autocratic view of property, is a form of urban intervention that is broadly accepted and welcomed, even by those who enforce the law.

Guerrilla gardening as normalised law-breaking: Challenges to land ownership and aesthetic order

This article considers guerrilla gardening that involves taking on other people’s land for gardening, usually without their permission. It is a practice that is overlooked largely by criminology, yet it can tell us something about attitudes to law and land ownership and challenges the approved aesthetic order of where we live. It can soften the look and feel of the city, leading to a different emotional and affective interaction with urbanity. Evidence is presented from a qualitative study of guerrilla gardeners from the North West of England. The discussion is informed theoretically by work on aesthetic criminology, do-it-yourself and temporary urbanism and the idea of urban commons. In this study, guerrilla gardening is found to be a normalised form of law-breaking that, despite not necessarily being to everyone’s taste and the gardeners having an autocratic view of property, is a form of urban intervention that is broadly accepted and welcomed, even by those who enforce the law.

Український міський вернакулярний сад: переосмислення в умовах повномасштабної війни

The paper contents a cultural analysis of the vernacular garden as a phenomenon of popular urban culture, as well as the transformation (politicization) of its role and perception in the conditions of martial law. The garden analysed at different levels: individual (gardening is an individual practice of a citizen), local (features of the local community, its values, lifestyle, common practices, problems, etc.), as well as at the level of tradition and culture. Structural analysis of the garden as a multifunctional space allows us to identify individual functions of this phenomenon. After all, by creating a home-made garden, a city dweller satisfies his needs in this way, and not only needs for products, but most often those of a social and cultural nature. The main characteristics of the vernacular garden were revealed: structure, non-utilitarianism, procedure. The main functions of the garden are socio-political, humanitarian, food, aesthetic, educational, unifying, educational, and entertaining. Ukrainian vernacular gardening is compared with other formats of urban gardening, which have a combination of different goals and corresponding functions: "community garden", Victory gardens and guerrilla gardening. In contrast to guerrilla gardening, vernacular gardening does not initially have political intentions – to fight against the state of neglected urban areas, to draw the attention of local citizens to the problems of the district. It was determined that the individual vernacular garden acquires a new meaning in the conditions of martial law: it becomes one of grassroots initiatives, practices of resistance, stability and steadfastness. Vernacular horticulture as an individual grassroots practice is a bright and promising mediator of important social and political processes that Ukrainian society is going through in times of full-scale war. The political aspects of urban vernacular gardening also touch on feminist issues. Usually, women are gardeners, and this fact is worth a separate study, because it is women who implement these practices and, accordingly, changes in the urban landscape, according to their botanical and aesthetic preferences, favourite plants and cultures.

Landscape urbanism and informal space-making: insights from a guerrilla gardening case in Montreal, Canada

ABSTRACT The present article follows the inception and the development of an unauthorized community garden that emerged out of a re-appropriated composting site in a municipal park in Montreal, Canada. The article identifies the principal reasons and mechanisms that account for how the guerrilla garden was able to remain in a high-profile location for a period of time. The article explores the intertwined combination of the guerrilla garden and the spaces it affected vis-à-vis landscape urbanism and its pursuit of a new urban development paradigm.

Community blemish or new dawn for the public realm? Governance challenges for self-claimed gardens in urban China

In China, self-claimed vegetable lots are emerging in urban communities through the appropriation of public green lands, a paralleled ‘guerrilla gardening’ phenomenon. However, disputes and conflicts arise due to the contested method of garden acquisition. Moreover, these gardens are rather stigmatised due to the urban-biased regulations embedded in China's aggressive urbanisation agenda, indicating the gap between grassroots spatial demand and top-down regulations. Using the case of Hangzhou, this paper aims to understand the governance challenges of self-claimed gardens in urban China through stakeholder interviews and survey. Findings reveal that the attitudes, interests and influences of gardeners, non-gardeners and community officials contribute to a cyclical spatial transformation between green land and gardens. The stigmatisation of and conflicts around gardens result from both an unfair stereotype of ‘uncivilised behaviour’ and inconsiderate ways of growing vegetables. The case study has also demonstrated that gardens have provided benefits in setting up social ties and strengthening a sense of community in China's high-density built environment. The governance structure of gardens should be shifted with the help of planning system refinement to de-stigmatise and legitimise gardening and increase the promising possibility of gardens becoming a new dawn for the public realm.

“Putting the cult in cultivate”: a rhetoric of guerrilla gardening in Green Valentine

ABSTRACT Green Valentine (2015), by Australian author Lili Wilkinson, is a young adult romance in which two teenagers rebel against their local council by guerrilla gardening. By taking part in an illegal activity, the protagonists of Green Valentine stage a political protest that stands in for their voices, which are silenced in public debates about the environmental future that they will inherit. Throughout this article, I examine the rhetoric of guerrilla gardening represented in Green Valentine. While the protagonists are too young to vote, their gardening is an active argument that communicates their political hopes. I conclude that the rhetoric of gardening in Green Valentine underscores the importance of community and political action to stop the capitalist production of spaces that impair the environmental future.

Seeing patterns on the ground: reflections on field-based photography

This paper reflects on field-based photography practices that are informed by the ‘shooting script’ approach and its potential for social science and design researchers to analyse urban spaces. By discussing an ethnographic study of allotment, community and guerrilla gardeners in London, it examines the shooting script in conjunction with grounded theory as a way of structuring the use of photography in fieldwork and analysis. The paper critiques the methodological underpinnings of the shooting script and reframes it as a performed embodied practice of documentation, interpretation and translation. Following on, it suggests finding ways to include self-reflections in publications. Dispersed throughout the paper, images and captions provide an insight into the research process and they evidence the potential of this visual methodology – when triangulated with participant observation and interviews – for analysing the distinctive patterning on the ground produced by gardeners and drawing out the ambiguities involved in their spatial boundary-making practices. Furthermore, the paper discusses the implications of moving from analogue to digital photography in fieldwork, and how the navigations between virtual and material technologies consulted during analysis co-constitute research outcomes. It continues by arguing that the notion of a ‘script’ might be too rigidly interpreted and proposes instead to nurture openness towards the accidental and contingent in fieldwork and analysis.

Anomalous /Guerrilla Gardening as a Local Participation Method

Demokrasi kavramını sadece halk yönetimi veya halk egemenliği sınırlarına hapsetmek yani etimolojik bir bağlamda değerlendirmek yanlış olacaktır. Zira demokrasinin oluşmasını sağlayan en önemli etken olan katılımın şekli ve muhteviyatı sürekli değişmektedir. Yerel demokrasi ve katılım kavramları da bu bağlamda hızlı bir değişim ve genişleme yaşamaktadır. Zira günümüzde yerel yönetimler demokrasinin yaşanması açısından sağladığı kolaylık ve erişebilirlik açısından bir okul vazifesi görmektedir.Son dönemde yaşanan teknolojik gelişmeler bireylerin yönetime olan mesafesini hem yerel hem de merkezi düzeyde azaltmıştır. Bireyler artık özellikle karar alma süreçlerine daha çok katılmanın yeni imkânlarını bulmuşlardır. Fakat demokrasinin mücadeleci ve aykırı yönü halkın katılımını sadece belli araçlarla sınırlamayı kabul etmemektedir. Nitekim bireyler kendilerine has yeni yöntemler geliştirmektedir. Bireylerin bu yöntemlerinin kabul edilmemesi veya dikkate alınmaması gibi bir durum söz konusu olamaz. Bu katılım yollarından biri de aykırı bahçecilik veya literatürde geçen ismi ile gerilla bahçeciliğidir.Çalışmanın temel amacı yeni bir yerel katılım yöntemi olan aykırı bahçecilik kavramını açıklamak ve Dünya’daki durumu üzerinden ele almaktır. Bu bağlamda yerel katılım ve kavramın yaşadığı değişim ele alınmış, yeni gelişen yerel katılım yöntemleri ortaya konulmuş ve Dünya’daki durum analiz edilmiştir. Sonuç olarak bu aykırı yöntemin demokratik bir yöntem olarak ne ifade ettiği ortaya konulmaya çalışılmıştır.

Reviving urban spaces through tactical urbanism in Baghdad: Five common tactics

This research investigates the socio-spatial causes and consequences of tactical urbanism practices in Baghdad. It attempts to identify the main creators of these practices and their motivations. It recognizes five common practices of tactical urbanism in Baghdad, public art, pop-up rest areas, pavement plazas, guerrilla gardening, and open streets. This research argues that the applications of tactical urbanism in Baghdad could revive urban spaces and positively impact local communities, and that it could have various implications for urban policies. This article examines evidence from fieldwork and interviews with individuals involved in tactical urbanism projects. It also employs a questionnaire which addresses the opinions of individuals in the profession of architecture and urban design regarding the impact of tactical urbanism.

Postsocialist Informal Urbanism between Creativity and Power. Notes on Four Projects from Romania

Abstract The author illustrates squatting, do-it-yourself urbanism, creative re-appropriation of public space, guerrilla gardening, and artistic occupy-type intervention as forms and evolutions of informal urbanism. By interpreting examples observed in two postsocialist Romanian cities the author comments on the thin boundary between informal and authorized urbanism, and between creativity and power; he interrogates also the key matter of access to the city, with its regulations, resources, and potentialities. His perspective implies an empirical and ethnographic approach to informality, which is analysed in the contexts of privatization logics, especially in relation to the reconfiguration of the public and the private which is so specific to postsocialist transformations. The contrast between grass-roots responses and official projects is seen as decisive in understanding strategies of representations, control of resources, and capital accumulation. Additionally the author suggests the relevance of theorizing such postsocialist urban processes in fruitful but critical comparison with other non-Western forms of urbanism, notably postcolonial ones.

3. Intervening with Agriculture: A Case Study of Guerrilla Gardening in Kingston, Ontario

The purpose of this study was to analyze guerrilla gardening’s relationship to urban space and contemporary notions of sustainability. To achieve this two case studies of urban agriculture, one of guerrilla gardening and one of community gardening were developed. Through this comparison, guerrilla gardening was framed as a method of spatial intervention, drawing in notions of spatial justice and the right to the city as initially theorized by Henri Lefebvre. The guerrilla gardening case study focuses on Dig Kingston, a project started by the researcher in June of 2010, and the community gardening case study will use the Oak Street Garden, the longest standing community garden in Kingston. The community gardening case study used content analysis and semi-structured long format interviews with relevant actors. The guerrilla gardening case study consisted primarily of action based research as well as content analysis and semi-structured long format interviews. By contributing to the small, but growing, number of accounts and research on guerrilla gardening this study can be used as a starting point to look into other forms of spatial intervention and how they relate to urban space and social relations. Furthermore, through the discussion of guerrilla gardening in an academic manner more legitimacy and weight will be given to it as a method of urban agriculture and interventionist tactic. On a wider scale, perhaps it could even contribute to answering the question of how we (as a society) can transform our cities and reengage in urban space.

The Aroma-Home Community Garden Project's Democratic Narratives: Embodied Memory-Stories of Planting and Cooking

Aroma-Home, a community garden project just outside Paris, France, originated in aromatics, flavours, guerrilla gardening and conversations. In 2013, Sarah Harper of Friches Theâtre Urbain joined forces with local inhabitants to reclaim urban public spaces marred by construction and neglect and to heal social and environmental wounds caused by this damage. Creating tiny artistic (agri)cultural eco-oases in brownfields, participants began to alter both the urban landscape and attitudes towards active citizenship as they used a community garden/art-making process to establish an urban agricultural ‘commons’ of natural and cultural resources equitably shared. Here, the shared resources were the gardeners’ edible stories and storied edibles: the collective memories of food growing and preparation, the shared meals, communal gardening and the incipient community activism of the participants. This essay explores how Aroma-Home Community Garden grew a garden rooted in local life by drawing on embodied memory stories of land, horticulture and food — stories shared sometimes in words, sometimes in gardening and cooking activities, and it argues that the garden’s efficacy is located in the participants’ memories and practices.