Feeding the green gentrification machine: urban agriculture and the barriers to a just ecological transition in Montréal, Québec

Abstract

As cities embrace urban greening, the impacts of sustainability initiatives are uneven, and research on progressive urban governments highlights barriers to meaningful structural change. This paper examines Montréal under the leadership of Projet Montréal, a party widely perceived as progressive and environmentally oriented, to analyze how urban agriculture can contribute to green gentrification. Drawing on interviews with planners, developers, and community actors, as well as discourse analysis of municipal policy documents, it traces how urban agriculture evolves from a grassroots practice to a sustainability fix institutionalized through negotiated planning. This paper makes two key contributions. First, a long-term perspective on a progressive municipal government shows how ecological initiatives are prioritized over housing through alignment with green growth coalitions. Second, the study demonstrates how sustainability fixes allow administrations to reconcile progressive rhetoric with growth imperatives, resulting in policy trade-offs that undermine housing affordability. These findings advance green gentrification research by revealing how progressive governments reproduce structural injustices through their ecological transition agendas within the context of a housing crisis. This paper offers policy insights on integrating greening with housing protections as a prerequisite for a just transition.

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