Guerrillas in the Garden: Super Stealthy Sustainable Urban Agriculture Projects

There's a secret war going on, and it's been raging for a while. You may have passed the battlegrounds on your walk to work, but you might not have recognized them as such because the war zones are blooming with flowers or bursting with produce. If you've noticed a scraggly, unloved patch of public land that overnight is transformed into a plot of herbs or tomatoes, you very well may have witnessed the undercover work of guerrilla gardeners.

The guerrilla gardening movement more or less formally began in New York in the 1970s, and today has gathered momentum and spread around the world, from France to California to Botswana. Technically, guerrilla gardening is an illegal activity, as it involves the cultivation of someone's land. The rationalization behind it is that there are a lot of spaces that have been forgotten by their owners, which can (and should) be revived by local people. Because it is actually illegal, guerrilla gardeners often run stealth missions at night, and sometimes bump heads with police and landowners. However these gardening projects are usually permitted and rightly so. After all, what's the big deal about pulling a few weeds and putting in a few plants?

There are different levels of guerrilla gardening, but each is a political act. It can be as simple as planting flowers in an abandoned patch of dirt, or as bold a statement as a collective of gardeners squatting on abandoned lots and transforming them into productive vegetable gardens. An example of the latter recently made the headlines in London, when a group of 40 activists took over an empty lot to create Kew Bridge Eco Village. London is also home to some of the most vocal and renown guerrilla gardeners, including Richard Reynolds, who has written the handbook on "gardening without boundaries or permission."

Guerrilla gardening, I think, is especially legitimized when the plants that guerrillas put in produce food. More and more guerrilla gardeners are focusing their efforts on growing food and creating community gardens, rather than planting ornamental flowers (although all guerilla gardening is encapsulated in a grassroots greening effort, and that's pretty good too.) In the best-case scenarios, the land cultivated by guerrillas becomes secured for the gardening through the city or landowner and becomes a stable, thriving community garden.

I'm not exactly promoting illicit activity here, but I do think that guerrilla gardening is an exciting and very positive movement in that it puts the power of cultivation into the hands of the people. Through the guerrilla-powered transformation of urban spaces there is great potential for the exponential growth of sustainable and resourceful urban agriculture by the local community.