What community-led growing initiatives, from guerrilla gardening to informal food gardens, can teach us about resilience, resourcefulness, and the future of urban green infrastructure.
I first became involved in guerrilla gardening while living in London as a graduate student, where my thesis, The Subversive Gardener, centered around designing for this “illicit” subculture. Guerrilla gardening is the act of cultivating land without formal permission, often transforming neglected, abandoned, or underused urban spaces into places of growth.
While it can take many forms, from planting flowers in vacant lots to growing vegetables along sidewalks or road edges, it is fundamentally about reclaiming space and reimagining who cities are designed for. At its core, guerrilla gardening challenges the idea that urban land must remain controlled, inaccessible, or purely functional. Instead, it proposes that anyone can actively shape and care for their environment.
At the time I got involved in the movement, my motivations were deeply political. I was frustrated by the amount of neglected and lifeless space woven throughout the city, such as vacant lots, barren traffic islands, and fenced-off patches of dirt. I became interested in how small acts of planting could challenge that neglect. Gardening felt like a way to reclaim land, even temporarily, while also creating moments of beauty and surprise in harsh urban environments.
What began as an act of spatial intervention eventually evolved into something broader. Over time, I came to understand guerrilla gardening not only as a political or aesthetic gesture, but also as a form of environmental education, community participation, and ecological care. That understanding deepened significantly years later during travels to Mumbai, where I encountered communities using gardening not simply to beautify space, but to support food systems, healing, and resilience with limited resources.
Most memorably, in 2016, while I was filming for The Subversive Gardener, my thesis project that would eventually evolve into a non-profit organisation, I had the privilege of visiting a boys’ orphanage, a children’s hospital, and a disability center, all of which were growing food for sustenance rather than for decoration. These were not ornamental gardens. They were tools for survival, educational spaces, therapeutic environments, and forms of community infrastructure. Although guerrilla gardening and informal urban agriculture are often framed romantically, in many parts of the world, they emerge from necessity, creativity, and resilience.
My first stop was a boys’ orphanage, where I met Pretti, one of the people responsible for creating and maintaining a rooftop food garden for the children. During my visit, I was immediately struck by the resourcefulness present throughout the garden, a necessary approach given the limited budget. Recycled materials such as old doors, cardboard, and salvaged construction debris were repurposed as siding for raised beds growing everything from eggplants to papayas.
Large trees had also been strategically positioned to provide relief from the intense Mumbai heat. Pretti explained that several of these trees had originally been considered “weeds” that had grown through cracks in the street and survived the monsoon season. Her philosophy was simple: if a plant could survive under those conditions, why remove it? Instead, she transplanted the saplings to the rooftop garden, where they grew and provided shade and cooling.
Pretti, one of the people responsible for caring for the garden, gives me a tour of the orphanage’s rooftop garden she helped build and now maintains. Photo by Vanessa Harden.
When I asked whether the garden provided food for the orphanage, she explained that while it was not enough to fully sustain the children, it helped supplement meals and reduce some food costs. More importantly, however, the garden had become a place of refuge for the boys, a tranquil space where they could meditate, daydream, and momentarily escape the realities of institutional life.
From there, I traveled to a disability center on the edge of Dharavi, where I met Julius, a community organizer helping residents transform the property into a productive landscape. After speaking for some time, he guided me through the site and explained the systems they had developed using little more than local knowledge and available materials. The gently sloped terrain was used to channel rainwater naturally through a series of horizontal trenches that crossed the property. These channels were filled with twigs, sticks, leaves, and even animal bones to improve drainage and soil retention.
The center shared a property line with Dharavi, one of the world’s largest informal settlements, making the project’s ingenuity even more striking. What affected me most, however, was not simply the design itself, but the collective labor behind it. People worked together using the most basic tools imaginable. Bowls filled with soil were passed hand-to-hand through human chains until they reached their destination. There was an extraordinary sense of participation and shared purpose. Julius himself was deeply inspiring, using common sense, experimentation, and local ecological knowledge to teach communities across the city how to grow food and become more self-sustaining.
My final visit was to a children’s hospital, where I met Graina, who worked for an organisation that assisted Mumbai residents in creating edible gardens, as well as Dr. Smita and her husband, both pediatricians, who resided in nearby Navi Mumbai. Dr. Smita showed me the newly established rooftop garden and spoke enthusiastically about her plans for its future. For her, the garden was intended not only to nourish patients and their families but also to provide a calming outdoor environment connected to the hospital itself. Many of the children staying there were not well enough to leave the premises, and the garden offered them access to fresh air, greenery, and sensory experiences otherwise absent from their daily routines. In this way, the garden became both a food-producing landscape and a therapeutic environment.
Dr. Smita and her husband tend the rooftop garden that supports their children’s hospital. Photo by Vanessa Harden.
Meeting these gardeners fundamentally shifted my understanding of ecological action. They demonstrated that meaningful environmental work does not require perfect infrastructure or expensive technology. Recycled and found materials were not viewed as limitations, but as entirely legitimate building resources. These projects became a powerful reminder that ingenuity often emerges directly from scarcity.
Equally important was the realization that none of these projects operated with significant financial support. In many cases, there was little or no formal funding. Instead, care, participation, and collective effort acted as substitutes for institutional infrastructure.
In many ways, these gardens also served as informal green infrastructure. Beyond producing food, they contributed ecological and social benefits that are often overlooked within contemporary urban development. They cooled buildings and outdoor spaces, supported biodiversity, improved wellbeing, increased food access, and reconnected people with ecological systems from which urban life is often disconnected.
What I witnessed in Mumbai ultimately expanded my understanding of guerrilla gardening. In London, I had viewed it primarily as an act of reclaiming neglected space and challenging conventional ideas about who has the right to shape the city. In Mumbai, I saw that same impulse applied to far more urgent needs. These gardens were not simply beautifying overlooked spaces; they were feeding children, creating places of refuge, supporting health and wellbeing, and strengthening community resilience.
They revealed that community-led growing initiatives can be much more than acts of resistance. At their best, they become forms of ecological and social infrastructure, created not through large budgets or institutional programs, but through resourcefulness, collective care, and a shared commitment to improving the places people call home. If communities can create food, refuge, education, and ecological value from overlooked spaces with little more than ingenuity and collective effort, what might be possible if we began treating these initiatives as essential components of urban infrastructure?
