A common theme in terms of how interviewees defined and delimited their practice was the requirement to keep barriers for engagement very low – both for the organisers of the practice and other users or participants.
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5.1.1.1 Low barriers for use and participation
Many interviewees emphasised that they considered it crucial to lower the barriers that might prevent people from engaging with their practice. One of the ways in which they tried to ensure this was by making their initiative free of charge. For instance, while a comparable ‘service’ or ‘experience’ might occur a cost (such as joining a library, visiting a garden or renting a bicycle), interviewees from book swaps, guerrilla gardening initiatives and the Equal Streets events all highlighted that their initiatives did not involve any registration, usage or entry fees. More than that, many initiatives offered free goods, such as books, seeds, compost or bulbs. For some interviewees this was a key part of their understanding of their practice. For instance, an interviewee from a guerrilla gardening initiative argued that for a substantial number of participants, money would have been a limitation (and for a small minority, a huge impairment), as people would tend to think of buying bread and other things first, before investing in plants for the garden.
This also highlights another important principle for many interviewees, namely to be inclusive and to be open to “everyone and anyone” – be they a
“millionaire” or “on the poverty line”. More than just being open to everyone, several interviewees wanted to involve specific groups that tend to be excluded, such as people with alcohol problems, people with disabilities, or – in the case of one of the spot fix projects – rag pickers.
Their aim to be inclusive sometimes had concrete implications for the choice of the project focus. Thus, one interviewee from a guerrilla gardening project justified their choice of growing vegetables over flowers:
“Not everybody is a gardener, per se, and just wants to spend their time growing flowers. Whereas everybody is an eater, per se.
Everyone requires food. […] And there's something we've grown, like
‘trombontino’ courgettes, which you simply cannot buy in a shop.
They're not sold. And people love seeing the unusual shape, like a trombone […]. And the baby carrots: the children who mightn't be interested in gardening or might do it once or twice, then it's boring,
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whereas they always want to pick carrots to eat, and little cherry tomatoes.” (GG2, interview, 2015)
For others, it determined their location choice. For instance, organisers of the Equal Streets initiative argued that they wanted their event to be accessible to all strata of society. This includes physical accessibility. Hence, they were insisting on it taking place in an area that is easily accessible by public transport. They also rejected offers the following year to re-launch their weekly Sunday event in the Bandra Kurla Complex, a planned commercial district in Mumbai, because there were no public transport links and the organisers did not want to exclude people without a car.
Finally, a number of interviewees pointed out that their practice was not supposed to be intimidating in any way. Interviewees from both book swap and guerrilla gardening initiatives also highlighted the importance of the activity taking place in a public space, as opposed to a particular building (like a library) or someone’s house. As one interviewee explained:
“You know, whenever I go in anywhere, you always feel like people are making a decision about whether they want you to be there or not. And there's none of that. With the [book swap] you go in, you take it, you go out.” (BS15, interview, 2015)
Interviewees from a spot fix project also mentioned that when going out to clean or paint, the group made a conscious effort to look like a “common man”, avoiding any badges, caps or t-shirts, in order to make it easier for people to approach them and join in spontaneously without feeling singled out.
5.1.1.2 Low barriers for organisers
Many organisers also highlighted simplicity and keeping the project “realistic”
and “contained” for themselves as an important boundary of their practice. This was partly by design – because organisers wanted to keep it simple – and partly by necessity – due to a lack of capacity to maintain it at any greater level.
For instance, book swap organisers explained that the concept was very
“simple” itself and most felt that any attempts to turn it into anything more
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complicated (such as encouraging users to give a rating or write a review about the book they read; or scaling it up across more stations) were doomed to fail or had done so. Other interviewees argued that it was important to consider the limits of their capacity, as it is better to do something small than nothing at all.
Keeping the activity relatively small-scale also had the added benefit of less administration. As one guerrilla gardener explained, she was secretly quite happy when a grant application for the project fell through, considering the extensive evaluation and administration work the grant would have entailed.
Interviewees also highlighted the importance of making pragmatic choices or compromises. For instance, one guerrilla gardener explained that he had started gardening in a playground area. He remarked that it initially did not feel like his “kind of space”, as he was used to work on pavements or at road junctions, rather than a space “behind a fence”. The reason why he took the decision was that his personal circumstances had changed and he now had a young daughter. Such pragmatism about his choice of location allowed him to continue his practice even in this new phase of life.
In addition to a simple concept, interviewees emphasised the importance of keeping the implementation and maintenance simple. Indeed, several interviewees mentioned that their project tends to “run itself”, is “self-perpetuating” and requires “little time and effort”. Guerrilla gardeners also repeatedly talk about the importance of finding the right plants that are resilient enough to survive with little watering or that might even recover from being trampled on. As one interviewee put it:
“You've got to plant things that can be resilient to these sort of treatments. It's a very different kind of gardening. And you can't always do a nice design, 'cause you're thinking in terms of ‘how will that plant survive in that location? I need to plant that there to block that there’. You're not coming up…and sometimes things like colour schemes don't…forget it. Forget it. ‘What survives?’” (GG7, interview, 2015)
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Interviewees from the book swap and guerrilla gardening activities also highlighted that the practices can be very low cost, as books are generally donated and seeds or bulbs can be obtained very cost-effectively, sometimes even for free, as samples from companies selling gardening products or from other gardeners who are splitting plants, while compost is sometimes provided for free by the local authority.