Work-in-progress

IDS Senior Thesis

Interdisciplinary Studies: Environmental Policy & Planning

Did you hear about the rose that grew from a crack in the concrete?
Proving nature's law is wrong it learned to walk with out having feet.
Funny it seems, but by keeping it's dreams, it learned to breathe fresh air.
Long live the rose that grew from concrete when no one else ever cared.

-Tupac Shakur (1971-1996)

Abstract

In this study the relevance and meaning of the cultural phenomenon that is termed guerrilla gardening will be explored. I will attempt to create a clear working definition for the term. Using this term I will seek to prove whether or not increasing levels of organization in this activist field will create a new trend in urban space management. Problems, such as the dangers of urban farming, and the issue of private versus public, will be explored alongside solutions, such as carbon sequestration and the creation of sustainable food economies, that are created through this activist practice will also be analyzed

Introduction

Guerrilla gardening is when people living in urban areas take it upon themselves to cultivate plants in areas where possible. Also called eco-activists, or green pro-activists because of the illegality of this practice. Guerrilla gardeners can be loosely defined as people who cultivate plants with or without permission, on land that is or isn’t theirs, where there is normally a discernable lack of vegetation.

Both parts of this term relate to broad ideas that people can categorically be defined as, but in that extent they are only one slight dimension of the dynamic and multi-dimensional properties that make up real people, as they truly exist in the world. Also being an activist activity there is much disagreement and discussion about what can truly be considered guerrilla gardening.

Gardens

A garden is a small plot of land used for decorative or substantive plant production, usually for personal or community use. Gardens exist as smaller more experimental forms of what we consider farms. An analogy would be that gardens are to blackjack tables as farms are to casinos. There is a risk of winning or losing at a blackjack table, just as there is an even larger risk of winning or losing potentially all of your money at a casino, and these same amounts of risk are applicable to gardens and farms. Gardens are more individual or focus on a smaller scale than farms. Generally gardens contain an element of leisure or personal independence through the production of sustenance or decoration, where as farms posses an element of a large scale financial endeavor for the purpose of supply of the same sustenance or decoration.

Gardens also maintain a property of style through design, in contrast to farm cropping which usually is more driven by efficiency and output. Gardens are more manageable due to size but also can be specifically designed for ease of use. Raised garden beds can be constructed so that the elderly or physically disabled can access the soil more easily. Gardens are easier to maintain again due to size but also due to relative functionality. Companion cropping (utilizing plant relationships to minimize intensive human energy input) is a much more feasible cropping method when applied to a smaller area.

Gardens are a more intimate relationship between humans and their environment, while farms might even represent a form of environmental slavery, depicting the soil as manual laborer and plants as mere economic products, rather than acknowledging the wealth of living organisms in the soil and the lives of the plants themselves.

Gardeners

Gardener is a term that usually refers to people who maintain gardens. Gardeners can function in many different ways, growing ornamentals or food is one distinction. Gardeners are also divided by whether or not they garden for leisure, or they garden for personal profit. However these two terms are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Gardeners can have motives that resonate more with gardening for leisure, yet they can still make some profits by selling their produce. At the same time people who garden as their source of income may also garden for leisure or for their own personal gain.

In any respect of the term gardener there is still the presence of a relationship occurring between human and plant. A relationship that continues to evolve throughout time, just as the focus of this paper tracks one specific type of interaction between humans and plants and seeks to propose the future of this instance of interaction.

Guerrillas

Guerrilla as a term in modern conception refers to an irregular method of pursuing a goal, referring to guerrilla marketing or other alternative methods of pursuing already recognized forms of similar action. Originally from the Spanish term for “little war,” guerrilla warfare refers to a combat strategy where smaller troops use the element of surprise and high mobility along with raids and sabotage to fight against a larger opposing force. The spirit of this meaning still exists in the ideals of guerrilla gardening, in that it is a strategy for combating a larger force through anonymity, mobility, and timing.

In guerrilla gardening an ambush would be considered something like the “garden in a night” project, where as raids would be more similar to “mayday” events.

The drive to spread vegetation where there was little or none before is one of the main drives of this practice. It is hard to date this practice back to a specific movement, due to the complex interactions between people and plants, and the evolution of this interaction.

Greening space

Through all these complexities one thing is starting to become increasingly clear, guerrilla gardening is probably necessary to maintain the up keep of the amount of plant diversity that is possible within green spaces in cities. If we were to cram every single spot of soil, even some that usually go unnoticed with vegetation it would add more color and life to the concrete wash that is cityscapes. Possibly we have come to the point that people actually miss seeing color and life forms that are not anthropomorphic due to the heavy saturation of population density.

There are many people in these urban areas, it is this population density which helps create the term city, and it seems to be a natural progression that when population density is high, and greenspace is low, there is a human reaction to create and expand upon the lacking greenspace that exists.

It’s not surprising that there is an increase in guerrilla gardening now that information can be spread so widely and so quickly. People who would have left the city for greener less densely populated areas years ago, might now respond to their gray frustrations by getting out and planting even if it is technically illegal.

Guerrilla gardeners are actually a set of people, considering the variations in legality of the activity, and the land use question of public versus private. Guerrilla gardening is an activity that can cause these usually strictly defined lines to blur. Already there are only a few episodes of guerrilla gardening that are recorded, and that being said it would seem that the events where guerrilla gardeners were detained would be note-worthy more so than successful activities in guerrilla gardening. The illegality of this activity may be a reason for the lack of reporting, but for certain the phenomenon is growing in organization, and efficiency.