eusocial insect cities

tower in the park

skyscrapers

colonists

assembly line

freeway

subway systems

Guerilla Gardening

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  Another strong historical reference beyond what I can personally prepare is from the British resource blog at Guerilla Gardening.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.

squatter cities

First, an image cascade:

Coptic Quarter, Cairo

Dharavi, Mumbai

Rocinha, Rio de Janeiro

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.