The purpose of our paper is to provide an in-depth look at guerrilla gardening as an example of sustainability in action. Through participatory action research methods that triangulate content analysis, 16 semi-structured interviews and researcher logs, two case studies were developed. The first was of Dig Kingston, a guerrilla gardening project and the second of the Oak Street Community Garden, both located in Kingston Ontario. The focus of the research was on guerrilla gardening, while the community gardening case was used for contrast and to deepen our analysis. Key themes that emerged from our case research included expression, intervention and spatial manipulation. Our main findings present a deeper understanding of guerrilla gardening as well as an analysis on the relationship between space and sustainability. In particular our paper lays the groundwork for how interventions, like guerrilla gardening, open up unexpected and non-normative possibilities for conceptualising sustainability. These themes contribute to current understandings of sustainability by illustrating how a localised action that operates outside of spatial expectations, in this case guerrilla gardening, is a powerful pathway towards producing engaging and sustainable communities. Thus, our paper contributes to the growing body of literature on open, reflexive and critical models of sustainability.

The purpose of this study was to analyze guerrilla gardening’s relationship to urban space and contemporary notions of sustainability. To achieve this two case studies of urban agriculture, one of guerrilla gardening and one of community gardening were developed. Through this comparison, guerrilla gardening was framed as a method of spatial intervention, drawing in notions of spatial justice and the right to the city as initially theorized by Henri Lefebvre. The guerrilla gardening case study focuses on Dig Kingston, a project started by the researcher in June of 2010, and the community gardening case study will use the Oak Street Garden, the longest standing community garden in Kingston. The community gardening case study used content analysis and semi-structured long format interviews with relevant actors. The guerrilla gardening case study consisted primarily of action based research as well as content analysis and semi-structured long format interviews. By contributing to the small, but growing, number of accounts and research on guerrilla gardening this study can be used as a starting point to look into other forms of spatial intervention and how they relate to urban space and social relations. Furthermore, through the discussion of guerrilla gardening in an academic manner more legitimacy and weight will be given to it as a method of urban agriculture and interventionist tactic. On a wider scale, perhaps it could even contribute to answering the question of how we (as a society) can transform our cities and reengage in urban space.