03.18.2004
A Guerrilla Gardening Research Experiment in the Manhattan Urban Terrain.

In collaboration with ‘socialmediagroup‘, we grew a garden on the roof of an 11 story building in upper Manhattan without authorization. This is the first installment in the series “eco-works” begun in 2003.

Rooftop Guerrilla Gardening: SkyGarden

It is estimated that in the year 2015, 55 percent of the worlds population will live in urban areas. In some regions, such as Europe, North America and Latin America, over three-quarters of the population is already urban . As cities have developed, they have pushed agricultural land further and further from their boundaries. Agricultural systems are increasingly owned by open-loop agribusiness corporations who are focused more on the bottom line than on planetary or individual health, and rely on the use of fossil fuels, chemical ‘solutions’ to land driven infertile through overproduction, genetically engineered crops, and undocumented and unprotected migrant laborers. Small-scale farms are diminishing leaving communities struggling to develop local economies, and those who remain on the land often need to work off the farm to keep the farm alive.

In response to growing urban populations, should urban centers involve themselves in issues of food production? Cities such as New York rely on importing fresh food from neighboring farms. Yet these cities have shown incredible yield results and social benefits from urban gardening initiatives. Additionally, following September 11, 2001 when New Yorkers found themselves isolated from the rest of the country as bridges and tunnels were closed to in and out-going traffic, is there more of a reason for cities to increase their self-sufficiency and food security?

We began answering these questions by experimenting with methods of urban gardening via architecture, crossing the boundaries of the built environment with growing material as we gardened seventy feet above the ground on a roof of Columbia University. Sky gardens, or greenroofs, have become more and more frequent in cities across the world as local governments, developers and individuals become educated to their ecological benefits. Greenroofs, as part of sustainable building projects, have been gaining support in urban areas such as New York, Toronto and Chicago, and greenroof organizations show initiatives are planned for hundreds of others (see greenroofs.com).

Roofs built to hold soil and plantings are noted to have the ability to filter and clean rain water runoff, to act as sinks for carbon dioxide, reduce summer temperatures elevated through the urban heat shield, and reduce energy costs for building inhabitants by decreasing the building temperature in summer and increasing it in winter (Empey, 2001 available online at http://www.cityfarmer.org).

Sky gardens have begun to focus on the possibilities of raising crops on the roof to feed citizens; nowhere has farming on rooftops been more successful than in Cuba, where creative self-sufficiency has proven valuable for survival.

We formulated the question: Can city-dwellers to take matters of food production into their own hands, even without a claim to land? How would we, as artists and educators approach the issue and merge two seemingly opposing landscapes into the human endeavor of producing food?

As both winter and our theoretical research drew to a close, we began enacting our own urban gardening initiative. Carting hundreds of pounds of soil up onto the roof, as guerilla gardeners , we installed a composting system and collected the fruit and vegetable scraps of friends to begin creating our own on-location soil. We rigged an irrigation system by attaching a chain of garden hoses to a near-by faucet, and found a group of like-minded individuals prepared to assist in tending to the plantings and running recon hose missions. We built beds to hold the soil, and planted vegetables and flowers.

After a few weeks passed and the plants began to fill out their beds, we began getting compliments from other roof-users, namely the union workers of the university. Within a few months we were harvesting leafy greens and carrots, and visiting the garden more and more for enjoyment and personal reasons.

Before we knew it, our first growing season was coming to a close, and it was time to put the garden to bed. We deemed the garden so successful we planned an even greater crop for year two.

During the second year of the rooftop garden, we were still gardening without the approval or permission of the university, yet we now had a following of staff, professors, and fellow students who frequented the space. The uses of the garden were expanding beyond that of food production, as we came to find that a nearby on-campus photography studio was utilizing the garden for aesthetic purposes. As the photo instructor informed us, more than half the class had submitted photos of the garden for their critique.

We expanded during this year by importing trees into the garden and experimenting with hydroponics systems to great success. As year two drew to a close and we were about to put the garden to bed, a random fire broke out near the garden. When NYFD found out we had installed a rooftop garden in a public area without consideration of the roofs load capacity, they demanded us to remove it immediately or be subject to steep fines, and the experiment came to its end.

Though we felt the experiment had its successes, we note that more efficient watering systems needed to be developed and we also would recommend finding a lighter-weight soil. We kept containers to easily-carried sizes that could be dismantled and stored indoors during winter so snow load did not increase the weight on the rooftop. Had we consulted an engineer, we might have been able to come to a definite load capacity, and left the containers up year-round.

We had documented the project and decided to use this documentation in an art exhibit within the university gallery. The garden was thus reborn in a way within an artists space, its properties exhibited in the ordinary aesthetic language of still photography, video, installation and sculpture, and in the unordinary language of home-brewed beer and sourdough bread.