Ephemeral Urban Landscapes of Guerrilla Gardeners: A Phenomenological Approach

This short research paper discusses the potential for understanding Guerrilla Gardening—a practice that creates informal and illegal green areas in urban environments—as a practice that both appropriates urban space and renders it public on the grounds of temporality, hybridity and humility. Guerrilla Gardening achieves this kind of publicness through the creation of an ephemeral landscape that both overlaps the existing programme of a space and makes rules and representations that it communicates visible and available for analysis. The paper offers a preliminary descriptive analysis of the practice and discusses the importance of linking the research on Guerrilla Gardening to the subjects of power and public space. This paper also proposes a phenomenological approach to understanding Guerrilla Gardening as a spatial practice through which individuals express their need for dwelling and caring by the means of recreating urban space.