Urban Horizons Lecture Series|Greenhouse Futures

Greenhouse Futures: Agrarian Questions, Infrastructures, and Imaginaries at the Urban(izing) Frontier

Recent disruptions to the food system caused by the pandemic, extreme weather events, tariffs, and war, have given a significant boost to the promotion and expansion of greenhouses as a key infrastructural component of agri-food production. Greenhouses are not limited to rural agricultural areas, however, but have also become prominent in urban and community (re)development projects in a range of commercial and non-commercial settings. 

In this talk, I engage with classic debates in agrarian political economy and more recent debates on socioecological fixes to think through how greenhouse expansion serves to overcome natural obstacles to production, while also articulating with entrepreneurial green development goals. I then discuss how such a fix also depends on a suite of settler-colonial logics and  discursive practices. Drawing on examples from two starkly  different landscapes – urban Montréal and communities across the Canadian Arctic – I explore how greenhouse infrastructures (and the imaginaries upon which they are poised) reinscribe colonial and developmentalist logics at these two distinct urban(izing) frontiers of (re)development, while in some cases also serving as spaces of contestation and self-determination.

Dr. Nathan McClintock is a professor of urban studies at the Institut national de la recherche scientifique (INRS) in Montréal, Québec and editor of the journal Urban Geography. His work on urban agriculture, food systems planning, environmental justice, green gentrification, and urban political ecology has appeared in a wide range of journals and edited volumes. His new research focuses on everyday governance and the historical and contemporary entanglements of urban development, racial capitalism, and settler colonialism.