Guerrilla Gardening: And now you!
After describing the most important milestones in the history of guerrilla gardening in the last post, I now want to give you, as promised, a few tips on how you can get involved yourself:
1. Find out about the situation in your city!
Many cities and municipalities have already responded to their citizens' desire for urban gardening and opened up public spaces to hobby gardeners. Outstanding examples include the City of Vienna, which has now created its own contact point for neighborhood gardens and has already funded 13 projects with up to €3,600 , and Freiburg, where public spaces have been made available for gardening since 2004 under the motto " Freiburg packt an ." But it's also possible without flagship projects: Many cities simply offer sponsorships for individual tree pits or traffic islands. Just ask in your city or municipality and beautify your immediate surroundings legally and sustainably!
2. Get involved for more green!
Gardening helps reduce stress, keeps you fit, and promotes a healthy diet . But there are also people who don't want to get their hands dirty every day and deal with weather that's either too dry or too humid. Good news! You too can ensure more greenery in your city! And you can do it through political engagement. A prominent example is the High Line Park in New York. An old elevated railway line was slated to be demolished here to make room for (even) more office space. But an initiative of committed citizens, the "Friends of the High Line," fought against this and ensured that the line not only remained, but has now become a beautiful park above the streets of New York. So you can fight for land from your city that you or your neighborhood want to cultivate. You can also simply advocate for more parks and green spaces in your city or join an organization that is already doing exactly that in your city.
3. Take what doesn’t belong to you!
Questions and permits are all well and good. But it's often more helpful to first establish the facts and hope that the city capitulates in the face of them! A good example from Barcelona is described in this video . Of course, not every city will simply legalize every garden retroactively, but once cultivated, the land can perhaps be leased or rented cheaply from the city or another owner, as is the case with the Prinzessinengarten in Berlin. This way, the owner doesn't have to put up a new construction fence around his vacant lot every two months; instead, he has someone to look after it, and he even gets a small profit for it. However, the leases are usually short-term.
4. Be a true guerrilla!
Don't feel like spending a lot of time planning? Don't want to constantly coordinate with others? Are you more interested in adding a splash of color than creating an entire park? Then roll or buy some seed bombs and brighten up your city. There are plenty of ugly places: barren tree trunks, empty flowerpots, deserted industrial areas, gray traffic islands, and so on. Just get started and get a taste for it!
The city gardeners wish you lots of fun gardening and would be delighted if you would share some of your results with us in the comments!
