ABSTRACT
The neighborhood of Sant-Henri in Montréal’s Southwest borough has long been associated with poverty, marginality and squalor. But this is rapidly changing as both extraordinary, large-scale green infrastructures and small-scale, more ordinary forms of greening are expanding across the neighborhood, amidst private luxury housing development and rising rents. Both extraordinary and ordinary greening are also connected to Saint-Henri’s transforming foodscape, where new gourmet restaurants and up-scale cafés, a renovated farmers’ market and renovated grocery stores are displacing the diners, dépanneurs (corner stores) and other food shops long frequented by working-class residents. What happens when, all at once, a community faces food gentrification, small-scale greening projects and large-scale green infrastructure? This chapter explores the greening-related tensions and inequities that are unfolding in Saint Henri, where new multi-scalar greening projects and foodscapes are stitching together a post-industrial landscape to create new—and often exclusionary—forms of urban living. At the intersection of these tensions, local community groups have resisted and fought for alternative forms of development on multiple scales.
Keywords
the urban development pattern of the city and neighborhood: recent fast-growing; real estate development boom; de-industrialization
the urban greening of the neighborhood: canal decontamination and regeneration; new green infrastructure; green space
the inequalities at stake: insufficient affordable housing; income inequalities; displacement; green gentrification; food gentrification
