Guerilla Gardening for Equitable Biodiversity Conservation and Urban Change

Guerilla gardening is the cultivation of crops – whether for food or for aesthetic purposes – on private or public abandoned and neglected urban, suburban, and exurban plots by individuals and groups that do not have legal property rights over the cultivated plots. A wide variety of plots are implicated in guerilla gardening, and include vacant lots and road medians. Efforts at guerilla gardening are widespread and have been documented across a large number of countries, with prominent examples from New York, Los Angeles, Detroit in the US and from various locations in nearly 30 countries including the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and Greece. The primary stakeholders in guerilla gardening are community members who see themselves as part of a broader movement to strengthen new strains of urbanism by through civil disobedience, challenging the commodification of land, and strengthening democratic participation. Other stakeholders include city agencies and officials who are at times called upon to adjudicate the legality of urban land use for unauthorized community gardens and land cultivation. The subversive orientation of guerilla gardening, in that it questions land claims embedded in property rights to urban land, makes it almost inevitable that it advances different dimensions of justice. Variations in strategies, contexts, and outcomes of guerilla gardening offer an important opportunity to assess how and when it contributes to urban transformative change for equitable biodiversity enhancement and food security. By comparing six case examples of guerilla gardening from around the world, this research highlights the conditions under which it strengthens transformative change for equitable biodiversity conservation in urban contexts. Outcomes demonstrate the relevance of guerilla gardening for transformative change because they show how it has led to changes in views, structures, and practices in many different parts of the world. It is also evident that there is a close relationship between the advancing of recognitional, procedural, and distributive justice outcomes and the multi-faceted manner in which guerilla gardening shapes urban food and land outcomes.