A topic that’s making its rounds these days is the practice of guerrilla gardening.
It can take different forms, but what’s being talked about most are “seed bombing” and stealthily taking over neglected public spaces.
Richard Reynolds in London has just released a book, On Guerrilla Gardening, and that’s causing a lot of the buzz. The hiply “criminal” nature of what he’s doing has given Reynolds a certain aura. Even Adidas is trying to tap into it with a proposal for an advertising campaign. Think of the “edgy” caché that Shepard Fairey developed with his “Obey” campaign of guerrilla-applied posters featuring Andre the Giant. In addition to now doing signage for the Obama campaign, Fairey has taken that celebrity and channeled into an art and marketing career. Reynolds is poised to do something similar.
In addition to London the practice is happening all over: Berlin, New York, Long Beach in California–lots of places. In Long Beach, for instance, someone recently named in an article only as “Scott” has been beautifying neglected traffic medians by planting them with attractive landscaping. What’s really to his credit is that he weeds and otherwise maintains the spaces, and he’s been doing this for ten years, more than twice as long as Reynolds.
In the same article, Ramon Arevalo, Superintendent of Grounds Maintenance for Long Beach, has said that he has no problem with “Scott’s” illegal activity. “If you want to do this, my advice is to contact myself or the council person. We want to partner with people who care about where they live.”
That sounds like the seed bomb for a whole new program cities could develop. Why not partner people who want to grow living things with governments in possession of butt-ugly patches of untended land?
Here in San Diego there are several beautification programs in and around the city where artists are invited to decorate the mundane electrical utitility boxes that populate street corners and front yards. Hundreds of boxes have sported interesting new paintjobs as a result. Why not do something similar with those dead zones spread throughout most cities by getting people to participate in beautifying their surroundings by planting gardens in neglected spaces?
And–here’s a radical idea–why not pay them something to do it?!
I think that the best over all approach would be to get a group together, and find support in the city government in which you live. Even more than just Robin Hood-ing plants into median strips, I think that a recognized beautification group can have great long term effects on a city – and the initiatives taken on by the government at a later date.
In the town I lived in last year, there was an organization in which gardeners adopted traffic medians and other public spaces for full-on gardening, as well as providing trash bins at town beaches. It has made the town so lovely…they are sponsored entirely through donations, though largely began as a volunteer movement.