Without permission: guerrilla gardening, contested places, spatial justice

ABSTRACT

This article examines the guerilla garden as a contested space of knowledge and a means of (re)composing urban landscapes. Guerilla gardening is the radical transformation of public property for illicit cultivation. As a practice, it involves individuals or groups of people transforming public and private spaces of neglect through the planting of crops or decorative plants. The purpose is to (re)compose decaying or unproductive spaces into sites of resilience and fecundity as a practice of spatial justice.

KEYWORDS:

• spatial justice
• environmental justice
• guerilla gardening
• environmental rhetoric

Acknowledgements

Special thanks to John “General Budhoe” Gottlieb, “Queen Mary” Thomas, “Queen Agnes” Salomon, and “Queen Mathilda” McBean. This article is not possible without their labor and leadership.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 I’m reminded of Arturo Escobar who writes, “From an anthropological perspective, it is important to highlight the emplacement of all cultural practices, which stems from the fact that culture is carried into places by bodies—bodies are encultured and conversely, enact cultural practices” (“Culture Sits in Places: Reflections on Globalism and Subaltern Strategies of Localization,” Political Geography 20, no. 2 [2001]: 143).

2 October 1, 1878 is a popular day in Virgin Islands oral tradition. On that day, workers assembled peacefully in Frederiksted, St. Croix, Danish West Indies, to demand higher wages and better working conditions on plantations. The rally soon devolved into a labor rebellion—the Fireburn—led by Mary “Queen Mary” Thomas. This resulted in the destruction of several hundred acres of land. The rebellion ended in mid-October. While there was a revision of the postemancipation 1849 labor law, there was trivial improvement in work life on plantations (Jeannette Allis Bastian, Owning Memory: How a Caribbean Community Lost Its Archives and Found Its History (Westport, CT: Libraries Unlimited, 2003): 12).

3 Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants (Minneapolis, MN: Milkweed, 2013), 341.

4 Matthew Ortoleva, “Let’s Not Forget Ecological Literacy,” Literacy in Composition Studies 1, no. 2 (2013): 66.

5 Arturo Escobar, Territories of Difference: Place, Movements, Life, Redes (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008).

6 Escobar, “Culture Sits in Places,” 141.

7 Aníbal Quijano’s colonial matrix of power is an expression used to name four interrelated structures of power (authority, labor, gender and sexuality, and subjectivity) during colonialism (“Coloniality of Power, Eurcentrism, and Latin America,” trans. Michael Ennis, Nepantla 1, no. 3 [2000]: 533–80).

8 Richard Reynolds, On Guerrilla Gardening: A Handbook for Gardening without Boundaries (London: Bloomsbury, 2008), 16.

9 William Cronon, ed., “Introduction: In Search of Nature.” In Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature (New York: Norton, 1996), 23–66; Jamaica Kincaid, “Alien Soil,” The New Yorker, June 21, 1993, 47–53.

10 Wendell Berry, The Gift of Good Land: Further Essays Cultural and Agricultural (Berkley, CA: Counterpoint, 1981), 186.

11 I’m working from Edward W. Said’s call to rethink geography as a struggle over power when he writes, “Just as none of us are beyond geography, none of us is completely free from the struggle over geography. That struggle is complex and interesting because it is not only about soldiers and cannons but also about ideas, about forms, about images and imaginings” (Culture and Imperialism [London: Vintage, 1993], 7).

12 Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias,” trans. Jay Miskowec, Architecture, Mouvement, Continuité 5 (1984): 46–49, via https://www.foucault.info/documents/heterotopia/foucault.heteroTopia.en/.

13 Ibid.

14 Ibid.

15 Ibid.

16 Ibid.

17 Paul Robbins, Lawn People: How Grass, Weeds, and Chemicals Make Us Who We Are (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2007).

18 Kincaid, “Alien Soil,” 48.

19 Leah Penniman writes, “As insurance for an uncertain future, they began the practice of braiding rice, okra, and millet into their hair. … of seed smuggling, picking up grains from the threshing floor and hiding precious kernals in their braids” (Farming While Black: Soul Fire Farm’s Practical Guide to Liberation on the Land (White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2018), 149).

20 Lucía Durá, Consuelo Salas, William Medina-Jerez, and Virginia Hill, “De aquí y de allá: Changing Perceptions of Literacy through Food Pedagogy, Asset-Based Narratives, and Hybrid Spaces,” Community Literacy Journal 10, no. 1 (2015): 21–39; Veronica House, “Re-Framing the Argument: Critical Service-Learning and Community-Centered Food Literacy,” Community Literacy Journal 8, no. 2 (2014): 1–16.

21 Joseph Stanhope Cialdella, “A Landscape of Ruin and Repair: Parks, Potatoes, and Detroit’s Environmental Past, 1879–1900,” Michigan Historical Review 40, no. 1 (2014): 62.

22 Race is especially important in this context. It is likely that the U.S. government spent considerable resources advertising to European American households because “[w]hile many Black families in the South and Latinos in the Southwest kept up gardening traditions, predominantly white suburban homes were big on shelf-stable products to fill newly expansive pantries, and technology that had gone toward the war effort was transplanted to things used in the home” (Jennifer Steinhauer, “Victory Gardens Were More about Solidarity than Survival,” New York Times Magazine, July 15, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/15/magazine/victory-gardens-world-war-II.html).

23 Kimberly Hodgson, Marcia Caton Campbell, and Martin Bailkey, Urban Agriculture: Growing Healthy, Sustainable Places (Chicago: American Planning Association, 2011), 12.

24 Nicole Ciulla, “Environmental Justice and Online Garden Exchange,” Sweetland Digital Rhetoric Collaborative, December 16, 2019, https://www.digitalrhetoriccollaborative.org/2019/12/16/environmental-justice-and-online-garden-exchange/.

25 Comfort Azubuko, “Edible City: Privileging Tree Aesthetics Misses Opportunity to Feed Our Urban Food Supply,” KCET, June 7, 2018, https://www.kcet.org/shows/earth-focus/edible-city-privileging-tree-aesthetics-misses-opportunity-to-feed-our-urban-food-supply.

26 Jullian Michael Schrup defines eco-gentrification as “an environmental planning agenda that leads to the displacement or exclusion of the most economically vulnerable human populations while espousing an environmental ethic” (“Barriers to Community Gardening in Portland, OR” [B.A. thesis, Portland State University, 2019], 5).

27 According to David Harvey, “The Right to the city is far more than the individual liberty to access urban resources: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city. It is, moreover, a common rather than an individual right since this transformation inevitably depends upon the exercise of a collective power to reshape the processes of urbanization. The freedom to make and remake our cities and ourselves is, I want to argue, one of the most precious yet most neglected of our human rights” (“The Right to the City,” New Left Review 53 (Sept/Oct 2008): https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii53/articles/david-harvey-the-right-to-the-city).

28 Edward W. Soja describes spatial justice as an outgrowth of the right to the city. It is a struggle over geography that recognizes access and control over environment not as a privilege but as a right (Seeking Spatial Justice (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010).

29 Ibid., 5.

30 “I will not provide a simplified ‘cookbook’ definition of spatial justice but allow its meaning to evolve and expand chapter by chapter from its initial description as what arises from the application of a critical spatial perspective to what is more familiarly known as social justice” (Ibid., 6).

31 Anne Marie Todd, “Deconstructing Public Space to Construct Community: Guerrilla Gardening as Place-based Democracy.” In Environmental Communication and Community: Constructive and Destructive Dynamics in Social Transformation, ed. Tarla Rai Perterson, Hanna Ljunggren Bergeå, Andrea M. Feldpausch-Parker, and Kaisa Raitio (London: Routledge, 2016), 171.

32 David Tracey, Guerrilla Gardening: A Manifesto (Gabriola Island, BC: New Society Publishers, 2007), 50.

33 Food and environmental justice scholars and activists sometimes opt to use the term “food swamp.” Food swamps differ from food deserts in that they describe urban environments where there is an abundance of non-nutritious food, which threatens public health. Both terms have received ample criticism; however, critiques of the term food swamp center on how the term obscures real problems with the food system. Moreover, the use of swamp as a metaphor plays on flawed cultural assumptions of swamps being disease-ridden spaces rather than biomes that actively filter water, manage flooding, and support biodiversity.

34 Biba Adams, “In Detroit, a New Type of Agricultural Neighborhood Has Emerged,” Yes Magazine, November 5, 2019, https://www.yesmagazine.org/social-justice/2019/11/05/food-community-detroit-garden-agriculture.

35 Ellen Miles (@OctaviaChill), “and that’s on asking for forgiveness not permission #grasshater #guerrillagardening #seedbombs,” TikTok, December 12, 2020, https://www.tiktok.com/@octaviachill/video/6902492329312046337.

36 I am reminded of Michael Pollan who writes, “What right had I to oust this delicate vine? To decide that the flowers I planted were more beautiful than ones the wind had sown?” (“Weeds Are Us,” New York Times Magazine, November 5, 1989, https://michaelpollan.com/articles-archive/weeds-are-us/).