Nathan McClintock
Professor, INRS Montreal, Quebec
Greenhouse production of and on the urban(izing) frontier: Infrastructure, agrarian questions, and settler imaginaries
Recent disruptions to the food system caused by the pandemic, extreme weather events, and the war in Ukraine, have given a significant boost to the promotion and expansion of greenhouses as a key infrastructural component of agri-food production. Greenhouse development is 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 green entrepreneurial 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 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.