Our community’s guerrilla gardening project started with five people, fourteen native plant species, and an abandoned strip of land behind the local grocery store. We were fed up with waiting for municipal approval to create green spaces in our neighborhood, where concrete dominates and the nearest park requires a twenty-minute bus ride. So on a Tuesday morning before dawn, armed with trowels and determination, we transformed that forgotten patch into something alive.
For three months, we tended that illicit garden in rotating shifts, watering in the early mornings, weeding on weekends, and fielding curious questions from neighbors. “Are you allowed to do this?” they’d ask, to which we’d respond with deliberately vague comments about “community beautification initiatives.” We weren’t sure if we’d be shut down or ignored, but what we never expected was an email from the city’s assistant parks director. “I drive past your project every day,” she wrote.
“Instead of sending a removal crew, I’d like to discuss how we might formalize and expand what you’ve started.”
That meeting changed everything. Lena, the assistant director, arrived with city planning maps and a confession: she’d been trying to implement biophilic principles in our city’s development for years but faced budget constraints and institutional inertia. Our small act of horticultural rebellion had given her something tangible to point to—a living example rather than a theoretical proposal.
We thought we were creating a garden; we didn’t realize we were creating leverage. The relationship between our grassroots group and Lena’s department evolved rapidly. She helped us navigate permits for three more sites, provided access to the city’s native plant nursery, and invited us to planning meetings where we felt hopelessly out of place amid professionals with advanced degrees and acronym-laden job titles.
We brought homemade muffins and passion; they brought regulatory knowledge and infrastructure access. It was an odd but effective partnership. Six months in, Lena forwarded an application to join something called the Biophilic Cities Network.
I remember staring at the form, intimidated by the company we’d potentially be keeping. Singapore with its supertrees? Portland with its comprehensive urban forestry program?
Our efforts felt laughably small by comparison—a few pocket gardens and a fledgling partnership with a sympathetic bureaucrat hardly seemed qualification for a global movement. “We’re not ready,” I told Lena over coffee. “Look at what these other cities have accomplished.”
She stirred her latte thoughtfully.
“The network isn’t just for cities that have it all figured out,” she explained. “It’s about connection, shared learning, commitment to progress. Besides,” she added with unexpected intensity, “I’m tired of our city being left behind in every environmental initiative because we think we’re not good enough to start.”
That last comment hit home.
How often had I used “not ready yet” as an excuse to avoid beginning difficult things? How often had perfectionism disguised itself as prudence? We submitted the application that afternoon, listing our modest accomplishments and ambitious goals with equal honesty.
Two weeks later, to our astonishment, we were accepted as a partner city. The first international call was terrifying. I sat in Lena’s office, surrounded by our core team of now fifteen volunteers, as faces appeared on screen from Milan, Singapore, Portland, Birmingham, and a dozen other cities.
When our turn came to introduce ourselves, I felt my throat tighten with impostor syndrome. These were real professionals with budgets and staff. We were a ragtag group who’d started with unauthorized planting in neglected spaces.
“We’re in our very early stages,” I began apologetically, but a woman from Wellington interrupted me. “Everyone starts somewhere,” she said warmly. “Two years ago, our initiative was just three people and a petition.
Now tell us what you’re actually doing, not why you think you don’t belong here.”
That reset the tone completely. As we described our projects—not just the gardens but our nascent plans for bioswales in flood-prone areas, the school curriculum additions we were developing, the neighborhood bike route with native plant corridors—heads nodded on screen. Questions followed, not condescending but genuinely interested.
By the end of that call, we’d received offers of template documents from Portland, design consultation from an architect in Singapore, and curriculum materials from Wellington. The most unexpected outcome was how the global connection legitimized our efforts locally. When skeptical city council members questioned investing in “frivolous beautification” during budget discussions, Lena could now respond, “This approach has reduced flood damage by 34% in Birmingham and cut summer cooling costs in similar climate zones by up to 28%.
We’re not inventing this model; we’re implementing proven strategies through our partnership with the Biophilic Cities Network.”
Name recognition and association carried surprising weight. The same officials who had dismissed “tree hugger ideas” now listened attentively to “internationally recognized urban development approaches.” It wasn’t that the ideas had changed—just their perception as legitimate, tested solutions rather than fringe environmental activism. The network’s resources transformed our capabilities.
We gained access to research we couldn’t have afforded, specialists who consulted pro bono, and most valuably, case studies of failures as well as successes. Learning which approaches hadn’t worked in similar climates saved us from repeating costly mistakes. When Birmingham shared their disastrous experience with a certain fast-growing but ultimately invasive ground cover, we adjusted our plans accordingly.
When Portland described the maintenance challenges with their first-generation bioswale design, we modified ours before breaking ground. What surprised me most was how much our small city contributed despite our newcomer status. During a network discussion about community engagement, cities with far more established programs expressed frustration with reaching certain demographics.
Our guerrilla beginnings had given us connections in neighborhoods typically underrepresented in environmental initiatives. Our necessity-driven approaches to low-budget implementation interested cities dealing with fiscal constraints. Our experiences navigating resistant local regulations provided insights for others facing similar barriers.
These exchanges weren’t just about technical knowledge but about cultural adaptation. When Singapore shared their vertical garden designs, we couldn’t simply transplant them to our mid-sized American city with different climate, building codes, and cultural attitudes. The value came in understanding the principles behind their success, then working together to adapt those principles to our local context.
Our first major network-influenced project targeted a chronically flooded intersection in a historically underserved neighborhood. Rather than the traditional approach of expanding storm drains—expensive and merely shifting the problem downstream—we implemented a design inspired by Portland’s water management systems but modified based on feedback from Wellington about community adoption challenges. The resulting rain garden became both functional infrastructure and neighborhood gathering space, with monitoring equipment that feeds data back to the network on performance during various precipitation events.
Not everyone embraced these changes. The shift from purely ornamental landscaping to functional native plantings faced resistance from residents accustomed to more manicured aesthetics. Network cities shared their educational materials explaining the ecological benefits and gradual transition strategies that had worked in their communities.
When our public works department balked at maintenance requirements for the bioswales, we connected them directly with their counterparts in similar cities who walked them through the actual time and resource commitments compared to traditional infrastructure. The children proved our most effective advocates. Through curriculum materials shared by network cities and adapted for our local ecosystems, schools implemented hands-on projects monitoring pollinator presence, water quality improvements, and temperature differences between green and conventional spaces.
When ten-year-olds presented this data at city council meetings, their enthusiasm and ownership of the results proved difficult to dismiss. Three years into our network membership, our city hosted a regional workshop for neighboring municipalities interested in biophilic approaches. Standing at the podium alongside Lena, looking at the room full of participants, I had a moment of vertigo remembering our pre-dawn planting behind the grocery store.
Speakers from Portland and Birmingham had flown in to present alongside our team. Our formerly illicit garden sites had become official case studies with interpretive signage and QR codes linking to network resources. “If you’d told me four years ago that unauthorized gardening would lead to this,” Lena whispered before we addressed the crowd, “I’d have asked what you were smoking.”
What began as isolated projects has evolved into a comprehensive approach informing everything from building codes to infrastructure planning.
The network connection transformed how we think about our city—not as an isolated entity with unique challenges but as part of a global community working toward shared biophilic principles. Local problems now prompt questions about how similar cities have addressed comparable issues, replacing the need to reinvent approaches with the opportunity to adapt proven solutions. The most profound change, though, has been psychological.
The persistent sense that meaningful environmental improvements were something that happened elsewhere—in wealthier cities, with more progressive politics, in countries with different regulatory structures—has been replaced by a sense of agency and possibility. When Singapore unveiled their latest breathtaking green building, instead of thinking “we could never do that here,” our reaction became “what elements of that approach could work in our context?”
Last month, a small delegation from our city attended the network’s annual conference. During a break between sessions, I found myself chatting with representatives from Wellington—the same people who had welcomed us so warmly on that first intimidating call.
“We’re implementing a variation of your school monitoring program,” the woman told me. “The integration with math curriculum was brilliant. Our educators love how it teaches statistical concepts through meaningful local data.”
I must have looked surprised because she laughed.
“Did you think knowledge only flows from established programs to newer ones? That’s not how networks actually work.”
She was right, of course. True networks aren’t hierarchical but multidirectional, with each node contributing based on its unique circumstances and innovations.
Our city’s value wasn’t in grand showcase projects but in scrappy, resource-conscious approaches born of necessity—approaches that often proved more replicable for cities with similar constraints than the big-budget implementations of network stars. As we expand our initiatives and deepen our network involvement, I’ve reflected on what might have happened without that fortuitous connection. Our isolated projects would likely have continued, perhaps even grown locally, but without the tremendous acceleration that shared knowledge provided.
We would have repeated mistakes others had already made and struggled to overcome skepticism without the legitimacy the network association conveyed. Most importantly, we might never have recognized that our local efforts were part of something much larger—a fundamental shift in how cities conceptualize their relationship with natural systems. The grocery store garden still thrives, now officially sanctioned and expanded to include interpretive elements about native plants and their wildlife relationships.
Sometimes I stop there on my way home, watching bees navigate between flowers that once were surreptitiously planted in darkness. In those moments, I’m grateful not just for what we created in that small space, but for the connections that transformed it from isolated act of environmental rebellion into a thread in a much larger, global tapestry of biophilic urbanism. A movement that reminds us that no city is too small, too resource-constrained, or too late to begin reconnecting its built environment with the natural systems that have always been our true infrastructure.
