Wedged between highways, fields, viaducts and factories, between rivers and the buildings that rim the city we can find hundreds of small vegetable gardens, tokens of a small-scale subsistence agriculture. Its fruits will never have the economic profitability of an apartment building or a commercial area, and its practice defines a use of time that is wholly contrary to the current project of a neoliberal city.

In face of the pressure exerted on these territories by the official city, and the challenge that is keeping them alive, the anonymous authors of these gardens seek to protect them by hiding them. Their defence system is to be as invisible as it is possible, seeking to integrate their gardens into the surrounding landscape: improvised obstacles that take advantage of the existing vegetation, to which they add found materials, urban scraps, or other objects. Improvised and precarious, in their ingenuity these barriers seem like a wild version of urban barricades. Their condition is twofold: on the one hand, these wild barricades are the boundaries of spaces in a state of exception, they enable and are themselves resistance practices and, on the other hand, they share out and divide the space, privatizing plots of vacant land.

The main difference between the urban and the wild barricade is, perhaps, its durability. Not unlike that of the struggles they materialize. The result of protests or insurrections, urban barricades can only last a few hours, sometimes days or weeks, a few months at most. Wild barricades grow and change over the years, their elements accommodate to the movements of the ground, to the waterways and to the growth of the plants. The logs, twigs and reeds used in their construction are assimilated by the living vegetation. These barricades incorporate the slowness of plant cycles, of the culture they are made to protect.