Cities of Fruit: Arts Intervention and the Radical Imagination

This essay examines the importance of the radical imagination in the face of eco-social alienation and shows how arts activism can promote popular education and collective mobilization. The analysis is based on the Guerrilla Grafters, an activist artist collective whose members surreptitiously graft fruit onto sterile city trees predominately in the San Francisco Bay Area. Original data include interviews with the activists as well as an analysis of relevant media. Many observers now acknowledge the imaginative challenges of ecological crisis, a phenomenon global in distribution and implications. Yet the way such imaginative dilemmas take form, and the histories and geographies that make new imaginaries possible, trace specific histories. I argue that the Guerrilla Grafters provide a generative example of using creative arts intervention to contest dominant social-spatial arrangements and forge new eco-social imaginaries of the US city. The group's practices, which have earned them an outsized and enthusiastic public response, help participants and audiences to see the systemic roots of ecological crisis and to envision alternatives.