In his postgraduate thesis, »Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit« (»The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere« )(1962), Jürgen Habermas sketched out how the bourgeois public sphere emerged at the end of the 18th century, and replaced the feudal structures that prevailed earlier. In this kind of society, public space contains the potential to serve as a locus for expressing and shaping opinion. In this context the city is not simply a space for urban life but is at the same time a platform for discussing and dealing with social problems.

Since the 1960s if not before this ideal conception of public space as a stage upon which to articulate public opinion has proved utopian. It would be truer to say that the growing heterogenisation of public space and social life through processes of segregation, privatisation, commercialisation and surveillance of public areas leads to the development of various partial public spheres, which often act unnoticed by the bulk of the populace.

Guerrilla gardening is an ecological form of expressing opinion that has spread gradually over the last few years. While graffiti, »Space Invaders« and various other forms of street art are now more or less taken for granted as part-and-parcel of everyday urban life, new forms of intervention emerge in the guerrilla gardening context. The roots of guerrilla gardening date back to community gardens organised by »Green Guerilla«, founded in 1973 in New York. Since 2000 the phenomenon has also spread to various European cities and entered general awareness in particular through the web blog by Richard Reynolds from the UK.

The very term »guerrilla« utilised by advertising consultant Reynolds implies low-level warfare in the backyards although, like most other guerrilla gardeners, he rejects attempts to categorise the movement with reference to activism, with all its political connotations. However, the movement’s objective is subversive appropriation and reclaiming of public space, with the guerrilla gardeners going out, usually at night, to transform abandoned plots of land, gloomy courtyards, traffic islands, empty flower pots or tree trunks into blossoming flowerbeds.

For example, in interventions motivated by political concerns and critiques of capitalism, flower pots planted in the shape of a Mercedes star suddenly turn into peace signs, or the golf courses of the middle classes are planted with thistles or thorn bushes. According to David Tracey, whose manual, simultaneously a »manifesto« on the topic, was published in 2007, the lowest common denominator in all these actions is »gardening in public space, with or without permission«.

Although it seems self-evident, it is actually an over-simplification to interpret clandestine appropriation of derelict urban land solely as another protest movement that can be subsumed into the anti-capitalism and anti-globalisation movement. It would be truer to say that a public sphere emerges in the guerrilla gardening phenomenon that can offer a productive means to counteract the dereliction and neglect of open spaces in cities in an era of curtailed public budgets and shrinking cities. Whether this represents merely optical beautification of one’s own environment or getting together to run a neighbourhood garden (Urban Gardening) with a view to growing fruit and vegetables for one’s own use or creating green oases and shared meeting places within the city: socially and environmentally sustainable use of the derelict areas certainly does contribute to improving quality of life, as demonstrated by reactions from neighbours and others not involved in the projects. In their clandestine operations, guerrilla gardeners succeed in generating more public enthusiasm for their actions and revealing ways in which, even with all the constraints that city dwellers face, people can redefine the responsibility for parts of public space that were once the exclusive purview of city park authorities and their bureaucratic structures. Ultimately the question arises as to whether this approach might not offer a genuinely up-to-the-minute way of returning a touch of nature to city-dwellers, at least on a small scale.

This idea of reclaiming the public sphere is not by any manner of means new, and nor is the notion of interventions in everyday life by individuals or small groups. Conscious appropriation of public space has become a matter of course since Guy Debord’s Situationist International with its aim of »greater construction of the environment«. Whilst guerrilla gardeners (re)use abandoned urban land for their own purposes, the multitude of groupings subsumed in the notion of »culture jammers« draw on the visual and textual messages of omnipresent consumer culture. The found images and contents are alienated or altered to refer more or less subtly to other contexts – always with a view to undermining the goals of the advertising and manufacturing industries by using their own tools against them and reclaiming the loci of commercial articulation of opinion. In the process, culture jammers generally attempt to alter the original so professionally and deftly that the optimistic and homogenised contents of advertising are unveiled. Often it is not until you take a second look that you realise the content conveyed definitely has nothing to do with an advertising message rubber-stamped by some firm.

One of the first examples of this approach was the Billboard Liberation Front, founded in 1977 by Jack Napier and Irving Glick in San Francisco, and which is still active, exploiting the massive advertising billboards so common in the USA along highways or by roadsides to cities to serve their own ends.

On the homepage of the San Francisco-based group with »no telephone number or mailing address« you don’t just glean a broad overview of billboards »liberated« since the late 1970, but also receive advice on how to play an active part too. In the comprehensive »Guide to Altering Exterior Advertising« for example, you learn when the lighting on American billboards is generally switched off, the best way to copy the colours and typography of the original advert or which glue you should choose to apply your own improvements to the advertising on particular billboards. The best strategy proves to be making only minor alterations to billboards to subtly undermine the original content.

The strategy of »beautifying« the visual environment initiated by the Billboard Liberation Front is continued in a plethora of different ways in the age of digital media. For example, in the actions by Adbusters, founded by Kalle Lasn in the early 1990s in Vancouver, or in the »Bubble Project« by New York artist Ji Lee, to cite just two examples. One particularly interesting aspect of the latter project is the way in which it is interactive on various levels. On the one hand, the artist himself went out onto the streets of New York to adorn posters at bus stops, on the walls of houses and elsewhere with inviting white speech bubbles like the kind you find in comics. Passers-by are encouraged to add comments to the bubbles, and this content – of course – generally ends up being anti-consumerism or expressing a more general social critique. On the other hand, people who are already more familiar with the project can download blank speech bubbles from the home page of the »Bubble Project« and print them out using their own computer. In both cases the results of the action are documented in photographs and presented on the home page. The stated objective is to transform the corporate monologue into an open dialogue.

 

Translated by Helen Ferguson

 

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