The Right to Grow: Future-Proofing Cities with Nature-Based, People-Powered Technology

We are living in a planetary emergency – climate collapse, rising inequality, food insecurity, and a daily doom scroll of war, extraction, and ecological breakdown. But while the crises multiply, seeds of possibility are sprouting in cracks across our cities. The Right to Grow is a call to action rooted in a simple yet radical belief: everyone deserves access to land, plants, and the power to grow their city.

Urban gardens are more than just green spaces. They are frontline systems of care, resistance, and imagination. From filtering air pollution to reducing flooding, they help future-proof our cities while reconnecting us with life’s metabolic processes – soil, water, fungi, plants, and people. Yet, the politics of who gets to design, access, and benefit from green spaces remain tangled in histories of exclusion and control. Taking back the Right to Grow means shifting power into the hands of communities to decide what grows, where, and for whom.

This is where the unlikely intersection of ecology and technology offers new tools for collective action, like glitch, a hands-on, people-powered cybergardening platform that turns your phone into a tool for citizen placemaking. glitch invites users to imagine new urban ecologies by chatting with a digital cyberbug that uses AI, AR, and local biodiversity data to design green spaces. Whether you’re planting pixel plants in augmented reality or scattering wildflower seeds in a street corner, glitch gamifies gardening as a tool for civic imagination and community resilience.

Technology alone won’t save us, but when powered by people, it can amplify grassroots movements reclaiming both urban and digital commons. From mushroom farms in post-industrial warehouses to neighbourhood food forests popping up in streets and neighbourhoods, communities worldwide are planting futures where care, beauty, and biodiversity thrive beyond lawn monocultures and consumer culture.

So how do we move from pixels to plants, from digital dreams to living systems? We start by taking hands on action. glitch is currently in beta, open for anyone to start growing their corner of the city online – and offline. By using glitch, you help us build a shared database of ideas, interventions, and imaginal green networks ready to be planted in the real world.

The future belongs to those who grow it. Join the Right to Grow and help us scale nature-based solutions, powered by communities and designed for collective care. Head to blossomwatch.bug0.io to start glitching your city today.

Author: Kalpana Arias, Climate Activist and Founder of Nowadays On Earth

Image credit: @shotbymelissaa