Culture in for and as Sustainable Development

STORY 4
GREENING THE CITY, CULTIVATING
COMMUNITY:
Social and cultural sustainability:
Re-connecting urban humans with the
land in Paris
56
Since the publication of the Brundtland Report
and Agenda 21, interest in urban nature has
grown, and for social, cultural as well as environmental
reasons. For many decades, nature within
cities has been ‘civilised’, relegated to a decorative
role, and appreciated at best for relaxation
and recreation. This position has been challenged
by recent enthusiasm for community gardening
and the more radical ‘guerrilla gardening’. These
activities reflect on the place and role of inhabitants’
engagement with nature in the context of
urbanisation.
Although guerrilla gardening varies around the
world, there are fundamental aspects in common,
notably social and political dimensions, and
above all the desire to begin to transform the
relationship of humans to nature. Guerrilla gardening
is interconnected with local cultures and
based upon ordinary everyday creativity closely
linked to nature. The initiatives function as common
ground for people to express basic universal
concerns on issues such as participation, democracy,
responsibility, trust, personal health and
aesthetic concerns.
Guerrilla gardening in Paris and its suburbs illuminates
the new understandings and roles beginning
to be given to nature by city dwellers, suggesting
fundamentally new cultural patterns are
being created. By means of direct action and the
changes it brings to the quality of the everyday
environment, it challenges both the perception of
what urban nature could be and the governance
mechanisms that contain both nature and use of
the land; taken together this underlines a desire
by citizens for a more enlivened milieu. In its
pre-occupation with important matters such as
the health of the soil and the air, rights of access
to land and soil as a public good, the preservation
of old species, the right to reproduce and distribute
seeds, access to healthy local food and the
implementation of alternative economic models,
guerrilla gardening touches through culture on
all three of the traditional pillars of sustainable
development, the environmental, the social and
the economic. The gardeners occupy public and
private space as public goods, for example via
shared use and open access to city public amenities,
self-sustained food production, and green
art. They question the conventional urban way of
life, remind citizens that natural resources such
as land are not endlessly renewable, and offer
alternative, more sustainable, pathways through
the urban world and lifestyle.
Culture is a dynamic concept; through initiatives
such as guerrilla gardening it creates openness
to innovation and change in terms of personal
behaviour. Guerrilla gardening also touches and
modifies perspectives such as identity, the shape
and importance of (perhaps dormant) local cultures
with historical roots; it provokes new cultural
experiences. It leads to experiments with
self-sufficiency and sharing, so that guerrilla gardening
in Paris is also a social movement which
symbolises its transformative power and the cultural
shift it is bringing about, in which participation
and civic empowerment are crucial aspects.
It has socially innovative outcomes, too, because
participants have an opportunity for social learning;
actions such as this, not requiring a code of
rules, can, as Evans Prichard says, create ‘a good
ordered anarchy’.