Connecting biodiversity and people through beautifying the urban environment
We conquer gray neighborhoods and transform them into colorful and biodivers oases by empowering the people living there. Ten years after the start of our foundation, we now have a movement with troops of guerrilla gardeners throughout the whole of the Netherlands. We inspire and help thousands of people to take to the streets, organize, and work together to improve their own environment and in the meantime boost biodiversity. The result: flower-rich streets, happy and connected people.
National
Netherlands
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Mainly urban
It refers to a physical transformation of the built environment (hard investment)
No
No
Yes
2022-12-31
As a representative of an organisation
Name of the organisation(s): Guerillagardeners Type of organisation: Non-profit organisation First name of representative: Cerian Last name of representative: van Gastel Gender: Female Nationality: Netherlands Function: projectmanager Address (country of permanent residence for individuals or address of the organisation)<br/>Street and number: Van Humboldtstraat 95 Town: Utrecht Postal code: 3514 GN Country: Netherlands Direct Tel:+31 6 15546588 E-mail:jenny@guerillagardeners.nl Website:https://guerrillagardeners.nl/
Guerrillagardening: let your neighborhood bloom! Having plants and flowers around you will improve your well-being and in the mean time boost urban biodiversity. We help transform neighborhoods into green oases. Our project concentrates on empowering people to meet and organize to make their own streets green, beautiful and in general improve the public spaces where they live. We help individuals and neighborhood initiatives to set up their campaign step by step. Our most important guerrilla gardening tip: just start small and close to home. Remove a few tiles from the sidewalk in front of your house and create a facade garden. Plant seeds in a tree garden; the space around a tree that is often empty. Or decorate your street with flower boxes. Everything is possible! We have developed a website with easy to follow step by step plans for any type of green activity that individuals or neighborhoods want to achieve. We also assist with applying for different kinds of subsidies and give hands on sustainable workshop to give nature a helping hand and to give neighbors or colleagues a creative and active time with their hands in the earth. Importantly, in the past two years, we also organized a nationwide yearly Guerrillagardening event with >20 municipalities participating in The Netherlands, which resulted in hundreds of green streets and involved thousands of people. We will enthusiastically continue with our mission of connecting people thru beautifying streets and boosting biodiversity in the upcoming years.
connection
empowerment
biodiversity
sustainability
fun
Loss of biodiversity, excessive heat, rainwater flooding...These are the problems we have to deal with in our cities. But guerrillagardening can help! A lawn or uniform block of shrubs appears green and therefore perfectly fine. But a monotonous place offers few types of support. Making such a place more diverse and transforming it into a native sea of flowers helps bees, butterflies and birds. The more diverse the landscape, the more corners with all kinds of flowers, the better. Most wild bees and hoverflies in the city are found in allotments and community gardens because it is precisely here that there is a wide variety of flowers and a diversity of structures (trees, shrubs, low plants). The more types of flowers, the more types of wild bees. If we design 15 percent of the city as a good place for insects and other animals to live – with food and shelter – many species can survive. So with our project we turn the urban spaces into a Valhalla for buzzing critters. Such a place then becomes a stepping stone: a hotspot of green in a desert of stone from which the winged friends can keep in touch with their peers elsewhere. Even a small area of land can be valuable if you grow all kinds of flowers and plants there.
Excessive heat is a currently growing problem in all cities. In the summer, the cities puff from heat stress, because the heat lingers between all those buildings. Similarly, rainwater flooding is a huge problem in our grey and concrete-covered urban environment. Getting rid of street tiles and replacing those with gardens is the best and easiest option to tackle this challenge.
Our projects faces these problems with strength and determination by providing easy to implement solutions in every street and neighborhood.
We reach our aesthetic goals by providing great examples of other citizens or neighborhoods who have already made their streets climate-adaptive, biodiverse and full of flowers, using our tools and our help. The images of the completed projects are a great inspiration for the individuals or organisations who are planning on setting up their own guerrillagardening initiative.
We see opportunities all around us!
What all guerrilla gardeners have in common is that they have an eye for opportunity. Once you put on the guerrilla gardener's cap you will suddenly see places everywhere in your neighborhood that could use a green injection. A neglected flower box – logical that a plant can be placed in it!
The bare space around the trunk of a tree - that's the beginning of a garden!
A block of prickly bushes or a strip of nothing but grass – give way to humming blooms!
A tiled surface – boring! Prefer a facade garden, the sidewalk is wide enough.
And playing in the schoolyard is much more adventurous when we plant a variety of shrubs, trees and flowers. Get rid of square and grey.
What the municipality has laid out monotonously and maintenance-free, we as residents from all parts of society can make much more exciting and surprising. We're taking our neighborhood back and connecting in a positive way with all our neighbors!
We believe our project is an excellent example of inclusion. Every neighborhood in the city will profit from a higher level of connection between its inhabitants and in our opinion there is no better way to achieve that than by working together for improving and beautifying your own street. We assist in setting up such neighborhood initiatives and provide all needed background information and hands on help that is needed. The most important asset, we believe, is the fact that our idea of citizens connection thru working together in your own street to simply plant some flower seeds and greenery can be very easily transferred to any neighborhood in our cities.
The involvement of civil society has been of major importance in realizing the ideas of our foundation in general and the National Guerrillagardening Festival in particular. You can appreciate the details form the attached evaluation report of our project where the time line, the developed products, all stakeholders and the results have been laid out in detail.
We believe that we are and will continue to be successful in achieving our mission of connecting citizens with each other, with their communities and peers by enthusing them to work together in their own streets and neighborhoods for a green and colorful environment for all.
The value of all stakeholders in our project has been tremendous and unmissable. We have involved municipalities, citizen science projects, many green organisations from the Netherlands and of course citizens themselves. You can appreciate the details in one our projects The National Guerrillagardening Festival in the attachment to this form.
Participating municipalities in the Netherlands: Alkmaar, Almere, Arnhem, Blaricum, Bloemendaal, The Hague, Eemnes, Enschede, Gorle, Gooise Lakes, Gouda, Harlem, Heemstede, Laren, Maastricht, Midden-Delfland, Sliedrecht, Utrecht, Wagening,.
Individuals and groups of people also joined in other municipalities. However, they received no special support from the municipality. Importantly, they could go to Guerrilla Gardeners for all the information about properly planting a tree gardens.
Nationally involved partners:
Stonebreak (Steenbreek) Foundation
Locally involved partners:
Foundation Utrecht Natural Performance in Utrecht
Green Arnhem Execution in Arnhem
Green Neighbors Execution in Almere
Annebel de Kok Performance in Goirle (volunteer)
Sustainable Montfoort As a pilot implementation in Montfoort
Specialist were of course important to advise on the type of plants we should use. Municipalities were involved in the legislation and approving the projects. Volunteers were unmissable for realization of all the ideas. And specifically the combined efforts and positive energy and impact of all these stakeholders is what lead to a greatly successful project which we will keep on developing and implementing in the future.
We have adopted the knowledge of a multitude of green organisations in the Netherlands concerning boosting biodiversity by urban garden development. In addition, we have discussed the use of native flowering plants, shrubs and trees with biologists and specialists in the field of ecology. Collaborating on national level has led to the success of our foundation in enthusing a multitude of municipalities to participate in developing and facilitating the ideas of their citizens to be involved in urban gardening in their own neighborhoods and streets. We believe, that setting up this huge network of specialist, municipalities, local politicians, Dutch renown celebrities and especially simply citizens is the key to the current and more importantly the future success of our endevour for boosting urban biodiversity thru participation.
Please, see the attached evaluation of the first Guerillagardeners festival we organized (2021). We are currently working on evaluating the even more successful festival in 2022. We have realized hundreds of biodiversity and climate-adaptation projects in Dutch streets and neighborhoods while connecting and enthusing people to work together in their own local environment with a major global impact. In addition, you can appreciate our foundation's impact in the link showing the map with all our projects and people involved in streets and neighborhoods all around the Netherlands. We believe the most important impact of our foundation is the ease with which all this can be translated to various cities and countries around the globe.
In our opinion, this project is innovative because of the simple but effective way of reaching people thru a website with step by step manuals for urban gardening in the common space. We provide all the theoretical and practical support to set up low-cost but high-impact guerillagardening projects and initiatives.
We use various approaches to reach our goals of connecting people, improving biodiversity and tackling climate-change related problems in the urban environment.
I. A simple and easily accessible but highly effective website. We have set up various missions (we only mention a few here) that people can easily achieve. Of tremendous added value are the practical step-by-step manuals per mission. Importantly, comprehensive background information on urban sustainability goals is also available.
1. Mission: A colorful facade garden. By creating a facade garden, we have a major impact together. If a house is an average of 5 meters wide, a depth of one street tile already provides about 1 to 2 m2 of extra greenery per house. This is beneficial for insects looking for food. And in addition to greenery, you also have extra water storage. The water goes directly into the ground.
2. Mission: Tree garden. You probably have one near you, a bare space around a tree. Often a place with dog poop or a place for your neighbors to put garbage bags. What if that turned into a flower festival for bees and butterflies?
3. Mission: adventurous flash action. Is the big adventure beckoning? Then go for a one-off guerrilla action and plant flower bulbs, for example. This can also be done further away from home, because little or no further management is required. For example, think of the bare edge of a hedge or in the middle of a roundabout.
4. Mission: Conquer your neighborhood together. Are you experienced in gardening and recruiting people? Then you can view your neighborhood with a critical eye. Which part of your neighborhood is neglected and could use a flower injection? A large project like this is best set up together with your neighbors and in coordination with the municipality.
II. We give theoretical and hands-on workshops for individuals, neighborhoods, organisations and companies.
III. We organize an yearly national Guerrillagardening event in the Netherlands.
We believe that our project is in itself a replicator. Our website, our theory- and hands-on workshops and the early Guerrillagardeners event are an easy but highly impactfull way of reaching, connecting and empowering people. We also have many examples of self-replication: one neighborhood has profited from our ideas and actions and the people leaving a few streets away are just taking things into their own hands and doing communal gardening together. We lead by example and our major goal is to actually become obsolete as more and more individuals and neighborhoods just take their streets back and make them beautiful for themselves and for all the other creatures living in our cities. So we believe that it is very easy to replicate and achieve the goals of guerillagardening anywhere.
In the modern world people get more and more isolated and urbanization leads to grey, concrete and dull neighborhoods. The global challenges that we tackle are: lowliness and lack of connection in neighborhoods; urban rainwater flooding; extreme heat; loss of biodiversity. We believe that in the past 10 years we have been, but still are and will continue to be successful in connecting people and helping them to improve their own living circumstances and urban environment by simultaneously achieving important climate change-related goals such as reducing heat, flooding and improving urban biodiversity. As stated above, we believ thestrength of our project to be its simple and easy reproducibility.
