Legitimising guerilla ecologies for urban commons.
Guerrilla planters use liminal urban spaces for dissident acts of ecological regeneration. I am troubled by how such a caring process of enhancing organism abundance could even be seen as a dissident act. Language of ‘fight’, ‘darkness’, ’seed bombing’, ‘hiding’ squeezes unfairly this community’s practices, making it difficult for it to develop or to be discovered by like-minded people. I wonder how these hidden communities could become test beds for techniques, ideas, and events in the light of the day. Could the latent potential of guerrilla ecology flourish by receiving institutional backup, so as to legitimize them and provide them their deserved visibility? Can we leverage decentralized self-organization for managing the urban resources, so as to reconsider the commons as an alternative to the logic of the state or the market when it comes to the management of shared resources?
I want to explore how guerrilla planting and its collective caring practices can be legitimized. How can we create a network that leverages the knowledge and actions of guerrilla planters for the sake of regenerating and protecting the urban commons? In other words, I would like to creatively explore how different city makers can work together for the commons independently of the legitimacy strata, strengthening local democracy.
To do so, the research could be structured into three main pillars.
1/ Legitimize knowledge
On the one hand, we will document the commoning practices of existing guerrillas. This could range from understanding the ways of noticing urban landscapes, to searching for liminal spaces for greenery, to the different artifacts that could be used for their practice (e.g., seed bombing, knowledge networks, etc.).
2/ Understand
Secondly, we will delve into finding out why its practices are considered illegitimate, not to say illegal. We will understand how (1) citizens, (2) institutions, and (3) the communities themselves perceive their identity, and how this one relates to its dissident and secretive nature.
3/ Explore commons
We will explore to which extent these practices could be legitimized through collaborations with institutions within the city, ranging from (1) cultural, (2) governmental to (3) knowledge institutions. Getting institutions to acknowledge and legitimize the participatory care of urban ecologies is seen as a way to democratize and restore the concept of urban commons and participatory landscape management. On the shorter run, bringing activities such as guerrilla planting closer from institutions would benefit the collectives by allowing them to have a larger reach, subsidies or even co-design regenerative actions based on the region’s plans, history and other expertise. Just to illustrate this last point, remediation is for instance a process of removing harmful compounds from the ground with plants. Guerrilla planters could actively partake in this regeneration if provided with the right seeds, legitimacy and synchronicity.