Leela Viswanathan

Sustainability through intervention: a case study of guerrilla gardening in Kingston, Ontario

The purpose of our paper is to provide an in-depth look at guerrilla gardening as an example of sustainability in action. Through participatory action research methods that triangulate content analysis, 16 semi-structured interviews and researcher logs, two case studies were developed. The first was of Dig Kingston, a guerrilla gardening project and the second of the Oak Street Community Garden, both located in Kingston Ontario. The focus of the research was on guerrilla gardening, while the community gardening case was used for contrast and to deepen our analysis. Key themes that emerged from our case research included expression, intervention and spatial manipulation. Our main findings present a deeper understanding of guerrilla gardening as well as an analysis on the relationship between space and sustainability. In particular our paper lays the groundwork for how interventions, like guerrilla gardening, open up unexpected and non-normative possibilities for conceptualising sustainability. These themes contribute to current understandings of sustainability by illustrating how a localised action that operates outside of spatial expectations, in this case guerrilla gardening, is a powerful pathway towards producing engaging and sustainable communities. Thus, our paper contributes to the growing body of literature on open, reflexive and critical models of sustainability.

Collaborative Geomatics and the Mississaugas of the New Credit First Nation

Collaborative geomatics systems are web-based tools that support a common reference map based on high resolution imagery. These tools allow communities to collect, store, and present dynamic geo-referenced information (i.e., oral, written, visual). By employing the Web Informatics Development Environment (WIDE) toolkit, these systems require less technical expertise to maintain, allow for prompt customizations, are relatively inexpensive and userfriendly. These collaborative information infrastructures incorporate concepts similar to participatory geographical information systems. This paper describes the early implementation of a “collaborative geomatics” system, which is a potential innovation in place-based information and knowledge sharing for fostering the capacity of First Nations communities. Collaborative geomatics may enhance the capacity of First Nations to develop “community-based constraint mapping” of Traditional Territories including the capture and use of traditional environmental knowledge (TEK) in a structured but culturally-sensitive manner. The tool will enable First Nations communities to manage and triage requests for consultation associated with development proposals within their Traditional Territories. A case study of the Mississaugas of the New Credit First Nation (MNCFN), who are subject to numerous treaties and who have recently settled a specific land claim, is utilized to demonstrate the potential utility of a collaborative geomatics system to manage and triage the high-volume of consultation requests.