Guerrilla gardening is a movement of radical environmentalists and sustainability advocates searching out marginal, forgotten, and/or neglected spaces and planting beneficial vegetation. Imagine recurrent visits to abandoned lots to take over green space for vegetables to supplement your fresh produce. Conceive of weaponry as seed bombs, filled with a variety of beneficial plant seeds in a compact compost fertilizer mix, shown below. This movement represents a force a collaborative coalition-based organizing (versus oppositional, e.g. anti-Iraq war organizing) as we have the bright potential to solve the problems we see regarding derelict, marginal public/abandoned spaces.
The LA Times Home and Garden Section recently featured the brooding movement of guerilla gardening in SoCal. It traces some of the history of other vacant/neglected space gardening movements. As urban designers and landscape architects, we are charged with providing legal policy and informationally supportive frameworks to support such citizen-led reclamation efforts. Another strong historical reference beyond what I can personally prepare is from the British resource blog at Guerilla Gardening. This site also has community links to find local guerilla gardeners across the globe, though its highly tilted towards European/Neo-European resources. There are also blogs set up for GG groups working in LA and Santa Barbara.
The challenge of creating an economically, ecologically, and culturally vibrant arrangement of a squatter city falls to contemporary landscape architects, who must be greatly interested both intellectually in the modes of improvisational vernacular design and ethically in the livelihoods of some of the poorest on the planet. A Harvard MLA recipient just went out on a limb to develop water solutions in Mumbai. What I know is that every latrine and trash heap has the potential for compost and fruit trees and every marginal space can be redesigned to embrace the community (with a garden, of course).
Molly O’Meara discusses livelihood and (the escape from) urban planning in squatter cities in Where the Sidewalk Ends, in Worldwatch Magazine. Excerpt:
Slums are often located on a city’s least-desirable locations—situated on steep hillsides, in floodplasins, or downstream from industrial polluters–leaving residents vulnerable to disease and natural disasters.
Robert Neuwirth examines squatter cities as hubs of creativity and new political battlegrounds. He gave a TED talk and writes a blog, both worth looking at.
Stewart Brand also gave a brief TED talk on the influx of people into squatter cities currently underway.
Pollan eloquently describes the difference between a pseudo-logical based approach to defining human or “culture” from “nature” through the inspriations gained from working directly in a garden as a beneficial ecological being (just like we talk about pollination or dispersal being beneficial insects functions). What seems particularly interesting to me as a movement artist/dancer is the way in which this physical form of involvement in one’s environment/ecological community (gardening) rearranges ideas about the dualism of “man vs. nature” to a manageable scale. Environmentalists cannot rely on using Cartesian dualisms to explain or examine environmental problems, because they omit us from a sense of belonging–we are at best stewrds of a fragile system. Instead Pollan posits a regenerative form of land management (a rotational permaculture system) as the progressive example of placing humans back into a beneficial ecological role.
Congratulations fellow queer Californians! We’re now deemed respectable people by the state government. This means we now have many of the legal priviledges and responsibilities that have blessed and plagued the straight folk for centuries in the modern world.
This also means we have a lot of planning today for the big gay day. When San Francisco started honoring gay marraige back in 2004, a flood of queer couples bolted en masse to city hall to get their commitment ticket. This is a unmistakeable moment in history of queer people taking back space normally relagated to the straight community.
As we queer folk know, the space which you may inhabit and exist unabashedly as your queer self are so very vital to our lives and community. We live in a world where we can only flourish in garborhoods, queer community centers, and sateillite queer bars/hangouts. So many spaces in the world are unabashedly heterosexual, which is fine in some respects–straights have to live and work somewhere–but what seems particularly problematic is when the church, city hall, and outdoor spaces commited to weddings remain spaces only for hetrosexual matrimony, placing our form of love as unholy, illegal, and unnatural. Indeed, that is the point of weddings historically: to show a man and woman blessed by God, the state, and the Earth.
When I first visited San Francisco in January 2008, one of my friends remarked that she once saw the most beautiful gay commitment ceremony in the palace of fine arts. This stuck out to me immensely–that one of the foremost landmarks in San Francisco so prized in wedding photos could be taken for the queer community. The same is true for the rush of queer couples on city hall to get married in 200–they made this civic space queer. Lastly, one must mention and thank the efforts of the United Church of Christ to respect and sanctify the love between queer people, to the point that many churches would not grant opposite-sex marraige until same-sex marraige was legal. In all these ways queer folk are striving to take back the churches, civic centers, and outdoor spaces never granted to us.
