Abstract
Greenhouses are becoming a regular feature of the urban landscape, their popularity driven in part by an eco-futurist, techno-optimist vision of “vertical farming” that articulates with entrepreneurial green urbanism. In Montreal (Quebec, Canada), however, urban greenhouses tend to be small-scale, low-tech infrastructures operated by networks of state, non-profit, and community actors, with an equity-oriented mission of working in solidarity with–and providing material support for–marginalized populations. In this article, we characterize the everyday governance of these “solidarity greenhouses” (serres solidaires) and examine the conditions that mediate their emergence and success within twin contexts of austerity and entrepreneurial urbanism. Examining three key challenge areas–project definition, municipal regulations, and funding–and how project leaders navigate them, we reveal how everyday governance is a function of relational and differential power between partners and the ability to navigate a shifting funding landscape. Governance is further deeply influenced by Quebec’s unique “community action” model and the ongoing dismantling of a once-robust welfare state.
Introduction
In parallel with the “global greenhouse boom” that is reshaping agricultural production at an unprecedented pace in rural and peri-urban areas (Zimmerer and Bell, 2025), greenhouses and other forms of controlled-environment agriculture are also becoming a familiar feature in urban environments across North America and Europe (Drottberger et al., 2023), marking a new chapter in urban agriculture (UA; Bomford, 2025; Carolan, 2020; Marvin et al., 2024). Some of these structures align with a high-tech, eco-futurist vision of “vertical farming,” where rooftop greenhouses and LED-lit grow rooms “transcend the climatic limits of existing environments by producing a technically optimized protected and productive interior” (Marvin et al., 2024: 1435), and purportedly reduce the ecological footprint of food production (Al-Kodmany, 2018; Despommier, 2010), thereby manifesting “the green and the grey” emphasized in normative visions of urban sustainability and the development-oriented green urbanism that has emerged from such a vision (Wachsmuth and Angelo, 2018). As marketable amenities integrated into green (re)development projects or commercial production, their discursive and material “inscription” in disinvested, food insecure, and postindustrial areas has further led to their promotion as a development strategy (Bomford, 2025) or as a “transitional” land use leading toward future development (McCann et al., 2023).
Yet, in Canada’s second largest city, Montreal, such large-scale, commercial, high-tech vertical farming infrastructure seems to be the exception. Instead, most urban greenhouses are much smaller, lower-tech, polycarbonbate- or polyethylene-covered structures, operated by non-profits/charities, community organizations, community gardens, or schools. Many, if not most, operate outside of the commercial realm, while others operate as social enterprises straddling commercial and non-profit worlds under the banner of the “solidarity economy” (économie solidaire). In this way, they resemble the shoestring community food security and food justice initiatives that have shaped the UA landscape for the past couple of decades, albeit in the shadow of higher profile, commercial urban farms (Horst et al., 2017; McClintock et al., 2021; Reynolds, 2015).
While greenhouses and other controlled-environment agriculture–both high-tech commercial vertical farms and lower-tech structures run by social programs–play an increasingly important symbolic and material role in sustainable urban development efforts, they remain relatively unexplored by urban studies scholars (Marvin et al., 2024). Furthermore, while UA and greenhouses have become an important new object of urban governance (McClintock et al., 2021), few studies have focused on either the management of greenhouses or their relation to the governance of the organizations that run them.
Governance here refers to both its formal and everyday forms. By formal governance, we mean the institutional structures and regulations mediating greenhouse development and operation in urban settings–building codes and permits, zoning, financing, management–as well as official definitions establishing parameters of acceptable use, which ultimately determine whether and how greenhouses are permitted to exist within the urban built environment. Everyday governance, on the other hand, includes the day to day decisions, negotiations, and actions undertaken by city officials to operationalize these formal parameters–for example, to fund a particular project, to rezone a residential area for agricultural production, to enforce a code violation–as well as the practices of the various non-state actors involved in constructing and managing greenhouses, in partnership with or independent of the state actors engaged in formal governance.
Attention to the everyday practices involved in the governance of greenhouses, we suggest, can reveal the ways in which municipalities have formalized and institutionalized UA, while also shedding light on the underlying tensions, contestations, and compromises–indeed, on the “everyday politics” (Beveridge and Koch, 2019)–involved in UA’s emergence as a land use. Such an analysis, moreover, can illuminate how these new infrastructures, which are both social and technical, might emerge from unique configurations of individuals, community organizations, municipal agencies and policies, and public and private funding streams. Attention to this diversity of state and non-state actors, often intervening at different geographic or jurisdictional scales can also help reveal the increasingly networked nature of urban food governance and urban governance, more broadly (Brons et al., 2022; Coulson and Sonnino, 2019; Davidson et al., 2019; Moragues-Faus, 2021; Rosenthal and Newman, 2019), as well as how such networks are both shaped by and contribute to a particular politics of place (Pierce et al., 2011).
Our focus in this article is on the everyday, networked governance of Montreal’s serres solidaires (“solidarity greenhouses”), which espouse an equity-oriented mission of solidarity with–and material support for – marginalized populations. That these greenhouses predominate in Montreal despite the hype surrounding high-tech vertical farming and the wider contexts of green entrepreneurialism and UA’s growing institutionalization (Bach and McClintock, 2021; Bherer et al., 2024) makes them an interesting, if not unique, object of study. Our goal here is twofold: first, to characterize the everyday governance of solidarity greenhouses and, second, to understand the challenges they face. To this end, we also consider what conditions mediate their emergence and success within a broader context of neoliberal austerity and a dominant entrepreneurial, techno-focused imaginary.
After a review of recent work on urban food governance and its increasingly networked nature, we describe our study site and methodological approach. Next, we provide an overview of these greenhouses and their goals, and the networks in which these greenhouse projects have taken root. We then examine three key challenge areas–project definition, municipal regulations, and funding–and the decisions and compromises that project leaders make to navigate them. The everyday governance of these projects, we suggest in our discussion, is a function of a particular politics of place, notably related to Quebec’s unique “community action” model and Montreal’s “neighborhood roundtables”, and ongoing efforts to whittle away these residuals of a once-robust welfare state. Attention to networked urban food governance and its everyday functioning in the context of austerity, we conclude, helps elucidate the historically and geographically situated nature of a social infrastructure’s ability to either reinforce or resist entrepreneurial, market-driven green urbanism.
Urban food governance and networked social infrastructure
Work on urban food governance has tended to focus on formal governance, with considerable work examining efforts by municipalities to integrate food into comprehensive plans, zoning, and programing, often on the recommendation of food policy councils or public consultations, while others have focused on the growing role of intercity and transnational networks in the development of municipal food policy (Andrée et al., 2019; Houde-Tremblay et al., 2025; Moragues-Faus, 2021). In both cases, the growing diversity of networked state- and non-state actors working together to develop and implement food policy and programing reflects wider transformations in urban governance in the neoliberal era, including: the devolution of decision-making, operations, and management to local state and non-state actors, notably in the form of public–private partnerships and other networked configurations spanning sectors, cities, and regions (Davidson et al., 2019; Jessop, 2013; Swyngedouw, 2004); a growing role of philanthropic organizations in setting urban policy agendas (Madénian and Van Neste, 2025; Montero, 2020); the reliance on non-profits, NGOs, and religious organizations in providing services (Rosenthal and Newman, 2019; Trudeau, 2008); the formation of citizen-subjects willing to shoulder these new responsibilities, thus buttressing the roll-back of state services (Gagyi, 2025; Pudup, 2008); and the privileging of community participation in formal, “post-political” planning processes, in which agonistic debate has been foreclosed (Gailloux, 2022; Hammelman, 2019). Austerity, Beveridge and Koch (2021: 453) explain, has further “intensified the hybridization of the state,” particularly at the local level, and accelerated the “transformation toward networked forms of governance,” more generally.
Yet, as Pierce et al. (2011) argue, each assemblage of actors emerges from and rests on a situated, “networked politics of place” that shapes its form, and ultimately its outcomes. Given the unique configurations of actors working across scales and jurisdictions, path dependencies, and local political culture, it follows that networked governance is shaped by such site-specific politics (Coulson and Sonnino, 2019; Gibson et al., 2023). Moreover, it cannot be understood solely in the formal sense of politics, as it also includes the diverse, intersectional, everyday experiences of the various actors involved (McCann, 2017). In this vein, everyday governance refers to “the actual practices of how interests are pursued and countered, authority exercised and challenged, and power institutionalised and undermined” (Le Meur and Lund, 2001: 1). Rather than attending solely to the actions of decision-makers and other state actors involved in formal governance, everyday governance attends to “the plurality of governance actors, their practices, rationales, normative orientations, interests and imaginaries … [and] their relative and contextual power that shape local (urban) spaces and environments” (Cornea et al., 2017: 2).
Studies of everyday governance thus resonate with work on the practices of care and social reproduction undergirding different forms of social support, mutual aid, and collective action. For Latham and Layton (2022), such “social infrastructure” refers to the informal processes holding together life in the city, and which can refer to the range of formalized networks of care providing social support where basic service infrastructure is lacking. Such networks may include state, NGO, and faith-based actors as well as grassroots collectives providing community services (DeVerteuil et al., 2022). Oscilowicz et al. (2025: 348) further describe how the “social, political, and economic capacities” of these actors themselves contribute to “the material and immaterial backbone to community autonomy” (Oscilowicz et al., 2025: 350).
Care should be taken, however, not to conflate everyday governance with informality or limit it to describing governance outside of state institutions, wherein non-state actors navigate and manage urban space, often in ways that skirt or contest formal regulations (Acuto et al., 2019; El Ouardi and Montambeault, 2023) and which constitute an “everyday politics” (Beveridge and Koch, 2019). Rather, everyday governance includes the actions of those working both outside and within the formal state apparatus. As the long tradition of work on “street-level bureaucracy” (Lipsky, 2010), “the prosaic state” (Painter, 2006) and the “everyday law of the street” (Valverde, 2012) has shown, a range of state actors–bureaucrats, police officers, inspectors–ultimately mediate whether, where, and how formal regulations are applied or enforced, underscoring the agency of individual state actors and the resulting contingency of formal governance. Such a perspective, moreover, reveals the extent to which a state/non-state binary is an inadequate analytical tool in the context of networked governance and neoliberal austerity (Beveridge and Koch, 2021; Rosenthal and Newman, 2019). Because power is rarely distributed equally in such networks (Coulson and Sonnino, 2019; Turcu and Gillie, 2020), attention to everyday governance can also reveal tensions between different actors and elucidate the power relations determining whose visions takes hold via what means.
While everyday governance has only recently appeared as an explicit analytical framework for understanding UA (El Ouardi and Montambeault, 2023; Herold and Park, 2025; McClintock et al., 2021; Pham et al., 2023), a rich body of work attends to the micro-scale governance practices in community gardens (Bródy and de Wilde, 2020; Egerer and Fairbairn, 2018; Eizenberg, 2012) and the everyday politics of urban agriculturalists intent on challenging larger hegemonic structures (Adams et al., 2013; Certomà and Tornaghi, 2015; Gailloux, 2022), their informal practices sometimes institutionalized under municipal programs, thereby shoring up state retrenchment and urban entrepreneurialism (Bach and McClintock, 2021; Bherer et al., 2024; Gagyi, 2025). In other cases, they operate in parallel to these formal programs or with the tacit approval of state actors, reflecting what McClintock et al. (2021: 515) describe as “the co-constitutive, ‘braided’ nature of formal and everyday governance.”
Study site and methods
Located on the Île de Montréal (Tiohtià:ke) in the unceded traditional territory of the Kanien’kehà:ka (Mohawk), Montreal (pop. 1.9 million) is the largest city in Quebec, its metropolitan area (pop. 4.4 million) home to roughly half of the province’s population. Several studies have estimated that between 35% and 40% of Montrealers are engaged in food production (Duchemin et al., 2021). Food production here has received widespread support from municipal agencies and community organizations alike, making Montreal a salient case study of UA’s networked governance.
The City’s supportive stance has opened the door to a growing number of UA projects ranging from micro-scale, often temporary, installations to much larger gardens and greenhouses (Bach and McClintock, 2021). Municipal support for UA is largely managed by the city’s 19 boroughs governments, but also passes through Montreal’s 18 ecoquartiers (“eco-districts”), quasi-governmental organizations charged with local greening initiatives (Senecal, 2002). A growing number of UA projects are being developed in partnership with private real estate developers eager to incorporate gardens and greenhouses as (marketable) green amenities (Frendo, 2025), a trend vividly illustrated by the recent construction of Lufa Farms’ photogenic 11,800 m2 (127,000 ft 2 ) greenhouse on the roof of a new Walmart (see Figure 1(a)). Moreover, commercial production has begun to take a more prominent place in the UA landscape over the past decade or so, with 62 commercial farming enterprises operating in Montréal as of 2023 (Nycz and Duchemin, 2024). As public discourse shifts from “sustainability” to the “circular economy” in Montreal, a techno-productivist paradigm, with its associated imaginary of high-tech vertical farming, maintains an outsized hold on how greenhouses are framed in public discourse, despite most of Montreal’s greenhouses being far more modest in scale and technology.
Four Montreal greenhouses. (a) Lufa Farms (commercial), Ahuntisc, September 2024. (b) Fermette B7 (solidarity), Pointe-Saint-Charles, September 2023. (c) Emily-De-Witt (solidarity), Centre-Sud, September 2022. (d) Serres de rue (solidarity), Centre-Sud, September 2022.
Estimating the total number of greenhouses is a moving target. For this study, we worked with AU/LAB, an urban agriculture research and design lab, to identify the roughly 20 existing or planned greenhouses in Montreal espousing a social mission. 1 Ultimately, we were able to conduct semi-directed interviews of 60–90 minutes each with representatives of 14 of these projects. Five of the projects date back to 2004, while the rest were either built during the current wave of enthusiasm for greenhouses or were still in the planning phase at the time of our study. We present each of these organizations in detail in Table 1.
Project mission/role of greenhouse, network configuration and funding source/sector of greenhouses included in this study.
ACA: autonomous community action; CD: community development; GC: Government of Canada (federal); GQ: Government of Quebec (provincial); HSS: health & social services; PF: philanthropic foundations; R&D: research & development; VM: Ville de Montréal (municipal); UA: urban agriculture.
We analyzed interview transcriptions for several themes identified in the literature on governance and UA (motivations, partnerships, funding, decision-making, dynamics of inclusion/exclusion) as well as for emergent themes (Saldana, 2015). Employing what Freeman (2020) describes as a “collage” approach that integrates qualitative analysis of multiple sources, we complemented our analysis of interview data with a review of media articles and content analysis of project websites and gray literature identified via internet searches for “greenhouse” or “serre” and “Montreal” and by using the names of individual projects. We coded this material using the same approach as the interviews, with specific attention to the projects partners and funding sources.
We turn now to our results, in which we first characterize the greenhouses, their motivations and activities, and the networks in which they are embedded, then describe key governance challenges and how managers navigate them.
Results
Characterizing Montreal’s solidarity greenhouses
Montreal’s greenhouses range widely in form and function (see Table 1 and Figure 1). The high-tech, commercial greenhouses of Lufa Farms (Figure 1(a)) are the outlier, as most of the others are small and low- or medium-tech polycarbonate or polyethylene structures (Figure 1(b)–(d)). In general, they are run by a single community-based, non-profit organization, some of which also have official “autonomous community action organization” (ACAO) status (organisme d’action communautaire autonome), which guarantees access to mission-based (versus project-based) funding from the province. While the organizations vary in size, often only one or two paid staff are tasked with managing the greenhouse project, often one of many other responsibilities. Many of the organizations also rely on volunteers, particularly if the greenhouse (and, in several cases, associated garden) is run as a collective.
Many of the projects result from partnerships between various community organizations, municipal agencies, philanthropic foundations, real estate developers, and other state and non-state actors. Many of these collaborations are facilitated by “neighbourhood roundtables” (tables de quartier), formal coordination structures in which various public stakeholders (boroughs, health centers, non-profit organizations) work together to address poverty and food insecurity, enhance living standards, and improve access to housing and mental health services. The unique configuration of actors involved in each of the initiatives studied is presented in Table 1.
Food production is thus integrated into a wide range of solidarity efforts. Of the 14 greenhouses we focused on, nine were integrated into networked partnerships providing Montrealers with a variety of spaces and services, including: gardens, food basket or meal delivery, seedlings, training opportunities, soup kitchens, food banks, community fridges, and solidarity markets. While some social enterprises sell produce at market rate (or even for a markup) and use the proceeds to fund complementary, solidarity-oriented services, others offer it on a sliding-scale or distribute it for free, often through food banks or other partner organizations. Aside from Lufa Farms, most greenhouses we studied focus on improving food access for marginalized groups or individuals in need, rather than on increasing the scale and efficiency of local food production. As one greenhouse manager told us, “Greenhouses were developed from a social- and solidarity-based standpoint in Montreal long before there was a Lufa-style emphasis on urban production.” 2
Critically, we found that greenhouses themselves are rarely the central focus; rather, they more often serve a secondary or ancillary role as an infrastructural node in support of an organization or network’s primary goals–e.g., supporting marginalized populations in public housing complexes or public spaces, providing affordable housing, assisting with social reinsertion, offering job training–while functioning as a launchpad for other solidarity activities (see Table 1). In the words of a manager of one greenhouse, “It’s starting from this infrastructure that we could scale up other projects.” 3 Many of these greenhouses offer a wide range of educational activities related to science, nutrition, health, and life skills, or serve as a space for social workers and organization staff to provide support to program participants and community residents. Some are integrated into school or extracurricular programs focused on preventing school dropout or supporting students with special needs.
Often adjacent to gardens, parks, or other public space, the greenhouses are also presented as neighborhood meeting places for fostering diversity and reinforcing social cohesion. For example, the Grand Potager greenhouse helps different ethnic communities cultivate culturally significant produce that is otherwise costly or hard to find in supermarkets; Fermette B7 reserves a time slot for immigrant women each week. Others such as Santropol Roulant connect seniors in need with younger volunteers to reduce isolation and to help navigate access to health and social services.
Many greenhouses are also integral to projects seeking to transform the use and perception of urban space. The Jardins Gamelin greenhouse, for example, was described as “transforming a ‘no man’s land’ into a public space” downtown (Paré, 2018); the greenhouse both attracted visitors to a dilapidated public plaza and created programing to involve the unhoused people residing there. Sometimes such interventions are temporary. Referring to the inclusion of UA in the redevelopment of a former industrial site in the Ahuntsic-Cartierville borough, an elected official stated, “There is no better way to start transitional occupations than to occupy these lands with greenhouses” (quoted in Esseghir, 2021).
In sum, Montreal’s solidarity greenhouses are involved in a wide range of activities. Their underlying motivations and the unique configurations of actors involved are similarly diverse, and present a suite of distinct governance challenges to which we now turn.
The challenges of everyday governance
Challenges tend to emerge around three critical (and overlapping) areas: definition of the project’s mission and scope, municipal bureaucracy and regulation, and funding. We address each of these in turn.
Defining a project’s mission and scope
The formal and everyday modalities of greenhouse governance are a function of the organizations involved. Each partner brings a unique set of social, political, and economic capital to the partnership–notably their connections with policymakers and funders–which they can leverage both within and outside the network. The involvement of organizations with a longstanding, visible presence in the community, for example, can bring legitimacy to the partnership, just as involving municipal officials can facilitate its formal approval. What each partner brings to a network can also determine the internal hierarchies and organizational dynamics–whose contributions matter most, who has the final word.
As UA governance depends in no small part on how the object to be governed is delimited (McClintock et al., 2021), defining a project’s mission and scope is a critical moment in a greenhouse’s development. A project as first conceived and presented to potential partners determines to a certain extent whether they consider the project relevant to their activities, and whether and to what extent they have the bandwidth to participate. Existing networks supported by neighborhood roundtables have helped organizations find common ground in defining a project. Nevertheless, given the “complex web of multi-level entanglements of actors, discourses, campaigns and priorities” (Coulson and Sonnino, 2019: 171) brought together, juggling or integrating the diverse missions and goals of numerous partners can be cumbersome. A single objective–social inclusion, education, food production–may come to dominate, rendering others more marginal during the planning process. As noted above, greenhouse projects are often ancillary to wider programing and missions which may take priority. In the case of a greenhouse to be integrated into an affordable housing project, the project manager explained, “Since housing was really the genesis of the project, that’s the part that gets the most attention from the steering committee.”
4
Another manager described how one partner pushed for prioritizing social reintegration via horticultural job training over opening the greenhouse to the entire neighborhood: That function basically prevented the other functions from fully expressing themselves. Like the community’s place in the greenhouse, the diversity of projects, multifunctionality, food security, a whole bunch of issues. Having one function so dominant in such a small space really made it such that other functions were silenced.
5
Network configurations, in this way, end up shaping the project itself: its goals and objectives, the scale and scope of programing, and the form and function of the greenhouse therein.
Organizational and community partners may also be wary of real or perceived threats from the presence of a greenhouse as opposed to other forms of UA. For example, residents of two Montreal neighborhoods where greenhouses had recently been built have questioned whether new greenhouse projects would benefit those most in need and several of the people we interviewed worried whether they might spur gentrification (Gailloux et al., 2023). When education and empowerment are clearly defined as primary objectives from the start, this is less of an issue, but when solidarity is not made explicit, there may be more reticence. For example, community members in a low-income area of the city resisted a proposal for a greenhouse that would contribute to the “circular economy,” a planning framework embraced by municipal officials to align redevelopment with energy conservation, waste management, and urban agriculture. Because the greenhouse would be heated from off-gassed methane captured from a covered landfill, residents feared that the technology might expose them to noxious gases or contaminate produce grown in the greenhouse. Furthermore, they argued, the project did little to reverse a long history of contamination in the neighborhood, and would actually legitimize ongoing exposure to pollution.
Navigating municipal regulations and bureaucracy
Regulatory hurdles pose another challenge for greenhouse governance. Even minor administrative obstacles related to zoning or permitting can stall or sink a project. Many project leaders therefore attempt to bring city officials into the network, to tap both their expertise and political capital. Neighborhood roundtables facilitate such interactions. As one staffer relayed to us, “We really count on our city partners to ensure that the project will fit with municipal policies, they know better than we do. And they’re also very involved in the planning of the project, especially the borough.”
6
In cases where the City or borough stands in the way of a project moving forward, project partners may have to find ways to exert pressure on municipal staff, but this clearly requires having sufficient social capital to do so. The leader of one group describes turning to elected officials to pressure municipal staff who were dragging their feet: City staffers would give me a hard time. They could drag out bureaucratic processes that theoretically should have taken three months to a year. And then at the end of the year, I’d have to get the mayor to intervene and slap them on the wrist so they could take care of the file. And that didn’t happen just once, it happened several times … When we started to make a name for ourselves, well, that’s when I built bridges with the municipal staff who I had to work with. Then it was simpler. There was recognition, there was openness. Those who weren’t open, well, no problem, I’d turn to the politicians.
7
If the everyday governance of UA involves navigating the regulatory landscape by collaborating with city officials, it can also involve flouting or ignoring formal regulations entirely. Some practitioners simply hope to “fly under the radar,” while others are more overt in skirting regulations, to draw attention to those they deem overly restrictive (McClintock et al., 2021). The leader of a pop-up greenhouse project describes proceeding without permission when they were unable to gain official approval to build on a city right-of-way: We started putting up the greenhouses without having gotten permission from the fire department or the City. It was basically an act of civil disobedience on our part, and once it was all set up, they all showed up saying, “Well, okay, now that it’s here, how do we make this work?”
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As with the case of the project manager who turned to elected officials to redirect city staff, the managers of the pop-up greenhouse leveraged their social and political capital, albeit in this case to ignore municipal regulations rather than to influence municipal staff. It is likely due to their reputation as an innovator in UA–and the social and political capital generated from years of high-profile projects and interactions with the City–that they were able to openly flout municipal regulations. In cases such as these, the City may simply turn a blind eye rather than enforcing a regulation that may have widespread support from the public.
Navigating austerity
In a context of cuts to unrestricted mission-based funding for ACAOs (which we discuss in greater detail in the next section), organizations have had to rely more on short-term, project-based funding for greenhouses and related-activities. Partnerships are typically able to secure funding for the initial construction of a greenhouse, but long-term maintenance and management pose a real challenge. Some have succeeded in integrating the greenhouse into existing public institutional infrastructure and programing, as was the case for the two projects located on school grounds. Many others, however, have adapted to these new funding realities by embracing a more entrepreneurial “social economy” model involving market activities (e.g., produce sales). Several of the greenhouses we studied function in this way.
Funding is also a challenge when a solidarity initiative’s mission fails to align with funder priorities. Some project managers expressed that commercial UA tends to be favored and funded more often. One greenhouse manager called it “heartbreaking” to see that “it’s just market-oriented projects” receiving funding, and explained how a productivist, market-orientation impacts funding requests: They’re asking us to put ourselves in the shoes of an economic actor. “How many jobs are you going to create? How much revenue will you generate?” … So, y’know, when I talk about volunteers, community members, community access, I lose points. I was told in a rejection letter for a grant that I’d lost points, that I didn’t get the grant because I was too focused on community.
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Interviews reveal that grants seem to fall into one of two categories: green development or food security. Projects with broader social inclusion goals may not fit squarely within either of these silos.
To navigate this economistic/productivist funding landscape, greenhouse project managers tend to be opportunistic, but this may require recalibrating the projects’ goals to fit with a particular call for proposals or a particular funder’s priorities. Some see such refocusing as a necessary part of “playing the game,” but others choose not to make such compromises. Several greenhouse project staff shared their concern that funders are overly concerned that greenhouses eventually become profitable and self-sustaining, but to do so would threaten their missions of education and empowerment.
Provincial funds earmarked for community action has protected some ACAOs from having to constantly recalibrate programing to respond to funders’ priorities; as the manager of a greenhouse project located in a social housing project explained, ACAO status “allow[s] us to ensure that we are always primarily accountable to the community, its well-being, its needs, and to maintain complete autonomy from our funders.” 10 But because this pot is shrinking, managers have to make difficult decisions that impact the quality of services they provide. For one greenhouse focused on psychosocial intervention for youth, financial constraints have forced staff to compromise between involving more individuals or providing higher quality programing: “What funders want is quantity. We prefer to focus on the quality of support, but that comes at a cost.” 11
The uncertainty of funding, as well as the sheer cost of constructing a greenhouse that appeals to a widely shared techno-optimist imaginary, has led some to rethink the scope and scale of their projects. Project organizers often find that institutional partners are eager to support photogenic, high-tech greenhouses, but these can easily cost millions of dollars to design and build. Proposed projects can quickly become unrealistic, as the project manager of an organization focused on dropout prevention explains: In the beginning, we were consulting with architects left and right, people in that field, to come up with something. … It was a project that had attracted money. It looked very glamorous. It was well publicized, in the news long before the first screw or the first pane of glass was put in the greenhouse.
In the end, however, the organization felt that the money spent on a larger greenhouse would have been disproportionate to their investment in other programs: We felt like it didn’t make sense, and then there were the exorbitant costs. … We ended up with a really scaled-down version. In other words, we now have a greenhouse that’s 200 square-feet. It’s more like a sunroom!
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The scaled-down greenhouse, even if less in line with what funders were hoping for, was ultimately more in line with their organizational values and mission of solidarity.
Discussion: Community action and state residuals in increasingly austere times
Contrary to the widespread portrayal–both celebratory and critical–of urban greenhouses as high-tech, gray-green infrastructures underwritten by entrepreneurial green development and techno-productivist logics (Al-Kodmany, 2018; Bomford, 2025; Carolan, 2020; Despommier, 2010), many of the greenhouses cropping up in Montreal are smaller, lower-tech structures serving networked partnerships comprised of state and non-state actors. These serres solidaires serve as symbolic and operational nodes in social infrastructure projects whose missions extend far beyond food production, including social inclusion, education, empowerment, access to health and social services, and transformation of the built environment. So how might we understand this distinct trajectory?
While the rise of networked governance has been associated with neoliberal roll-out in the wake of the state roll-back (Beveridge and Koch, 2021; Rosenthal and Newman, 2019) and the use of UA (both permanent and temporary) critiqued for its entanglements in green gentrification (McClintock, 2018; Sax et al., 2023), the social infrastructures in which Montreal’s solidarity greenhouses operate are rooted in a longer history of community organizing (Saint-Hilaire-Gravel, 2013). During Quebec’s “Quiet Revolution” of the 1960s and 1970s, the nationalist provincial government invested heavily in cooperatives and other collective enterprises as a central pillar of economic development, which would, alongside community organizations, provide “institutional complementarity” within a newly robust, expansive, and interventionist welfare state (Rigaud et al., 2010). With the goal of better serving and empowering Quebec’s most vulnerable, the “community action” (action communautaire) movement embarked on local projects offering services to complement the universal programs on offer from the state. The opening of a community health clinic in the working-class Pointe-Saint-Charles neighborhood in 1970 is a widely lauded example of community action in Montreal (Dufour and Guay, 2019; High, 2022).
Wary of the instrumentalization of partnerships with the state, movement activists in the 1990s fought for a policy that would guarantee funding while allowing them to retain autonomy in their efforts to reduce inequality and empower marginalized populations. Seeing a potential “win–win” that would help advance an increasingly neoliberal agenda, the Quebec government agreed to the activists’ demands because it allowed for the downloading of certain social service programing to community groups; in 2001 it recognized ACAOs as a distinct legal class of organization eligible for mission-based funding from the province (White, 2012). It is a unique funding model, Dufour and Guay (2019: 113) argue, because “the State subsidizes groups advocating for rights so that they can not only provide services to the population but also challenge certain actions or inactions of the State.”
Also emerging from Montreal’s history of community action are the neighborhood roundtables that anchor many of the networks in which greenhouses operate. Since the 1980s roundtables have served as umbrella structures that bring organizations offering social services or engaging in community advocacy together with various public stakeholders (boroughs, health centers, and other departments or agencies). Roundtables have been integral to the development of projects to fight poverty and food insecurity, enhance living standards, and improve access to housing and mental health services, and have come to play an important role in guiding municipal policy (Cloutier and Sacco, 2012). Since 2006, they have been jointly funded by the City, the regional public health agency, and the Centraide foundation.
While neoliberalization was slower to unfold in Quebec than elsewhere in Canada (Bherer et al., 2024; White, 2012), austerity measures undertaken over the past several years have nevertheless burdened community actors and placed stress on these collaborative governance structures. Budget cuts imposed in the mid-2010s by the Parti libéral du Québec, and since 2018 by the governing Coalition d’avenir du Québec (CAQ), have reduced social services funding, and the province has stalled or refused to grant ACAO status to new applicants (Bherer et al., 2024; Hamel and Keil, 2020). As a result of these cutbacks, and exacerbated by the COVID pandemic, ACAOs have seen a continuous decrease in the proportion of their funding coming from the unrestricted community action funds earmarked by the province (Métivier, 2024).
As a result, community organizations have had to become more entrepreneurial and rely increasingly on philanthropic foundations to fund short-term, “one-off” projects rather than their wider missions. Members of the same partnerships often end up competing with each other for the same grants, laying bare a key contradiction emerging from the transition from the largely state-supported community action model to a more neoliberal networked governance model. As many of the solidarity greenhouses we studied are the initiatives of partnerships anchored by neighborhood roundtables, and at least half involve ACAOs financed by the provincial Ministry of Health and Social Services, the everyday governance of Montreal’s greenhouses has been shaped by this tension between a strong tradition of community action, ongoing austerity, and dependence on philanthropy. At the same time, however, some scholars have shown that community organizations in Quebec, demanding more autonomy, have managed to push philanthropic foundations to adopt a social transformation model, which necessitates longer-term and less-restricted funding (Gagnon et al., 2022; Lefèvre and Berthiaume, 2017).
Our study thus illustrates the situated nature of everyday governance. The unique character of Montreal’s solidarity greenhouses and their governance can in many ways be attributed to the specific historical and geographic context in which they have emerged. The proliferation of greenhouse projects builds on the successes of a well-established UA movement that has enjoyed state support (Bouvier-Daclon and Sénécal, 2001; Saint-Hilaire-Gravel, 2013), but also on the local tradition of community action led by networked coalitions tackling a range of social issues, including, but not limited to food (Bherer et al., 2024; Cloutier and Sacco, 2012; White, 2012).
Importantly, in the context of austerity, such networks continue to be supported by “residuals” (Martin and Pierce, 2013) of Quebec’s shrinking welfare state, policies which paradoxically arose from the marriage of community demands for autonomy and a neoliberal logic of devolution of social service provisioning (White, 2012). Mission-specific funding provided by the province to ACAOs has proven vital for greenhouse projects to take root, providing a modicum of stability even as funding becomes more precarious. Similarly, neighborhood roundtables, supported by the City, the regional public health agency, and a large philanthropic foundation, offer a space in which community organizations can collectively develop social infrastructure projects and where representatives of different branches of the state–a public works manager, a community health clinic worker, an urban planner–can interact and inform decision-making outside of the normal silos in which they operate. In this way, “the local state serves as a transmitter of austerity and an arena of contestation at the same time” (Beveridge and Koch, 2021: 453).
It remains to be seen whether these solidarity initiatives, grounded in a distinct history of community action, can resist continued funding cuts, and how the everyday governance of these nodes of social infrastructure will adapt in response. Strengthening and expanding support for ACAOs would clearly bolster the successes such solidarity infrastructures. As in cities elsewhere, however, where cuts to social programs are framed as pragmatic and commonsense and masked behind parallel commitments to (entrepreneurial) green development (Wallin, 2025), such investment is unlikely.
Conclusion
While the experiences of Montreal’s greenhouse managers speak to the situated nature of everyday governance, they also offer insights into networked governance that are broader reaching. As our study has revealed, the everyday governance of greenhouses and the networks in which they are operate is characterized by constant negotiation and compromise between partners (both state and non-state actors alike) and adaptation to changing funding realities on the ground.
First and foremost, projects and their governance are shaped by the unique configuration of the network itself. A network’s internal structure and politics not only determine a project’s mission, but also its success or failure (Coulson and Sonnino, 2019; Gibson et al., 2023; Turcu and Gillie, 2020). Which actors are involved, which partners wield more power, and who stays on board for the duration ultimately mediate which projects may benefit from municipal support and which may run up against regulatory hurdles or go un(der)funded.
Solidarity networks, in this way, also depend in no small part on the involvement of individual state actors to clear the way for them. That these individuals allow certain projects to progress even when they fall outside of regulatory norms reveals the contingent nature of regulation as well as the power and agency of “street-level bureaucrats” within institutions often depicted as monolithic (Lipsky, 2010; Valverde, 2012), just as their presence helps to explain how non-profits continue to “operate in the shadow of state hierarchy” (Rosenthal and Newman, 2019: 1443), despite the horizontal and heterarchical nature of networked governance and the significant role they play in providing services.
Finally, a precarious funding landscape can delimit both the scope and scale of projects, impacting project definition, implementation, and maintenance over the long-term. We found that as mission-based funding shrinks under provincial austerity, network partners have had to recalibrate their objectives, threading the needle between economic productivity and providing social services, thus reflecting conflicting visions of the city, more broadly. Examining this balancing act through a lens of everyday governance reveals, furthermore, how social infrastructures can both reinforce and resist entrepreneurial, market-driven green urbanism, with its concomitant risk of green gentrification and displacement (McClintock, 2018; Oscilowicz et al., 2025), something many project staff raised as a real concern. While embracing the techno-optimism that has galvanized interest in high-tech greenhouses can clearly open the door to funding and investment (Bomford, 2025; Zimmerer and Bell, 2025), it can detract from underlying commitments to solidarity.
Yet even as most projects managers we spoke with opportunistically navigate funding opportunities defined by these same productivist and techno-optimist visions, they have so far been largely able to resist cooptation by such logics, and managed to preserve their underlying ethos of community action to support marginalized groups and advocate for social transformation. This, we have argued, is the result of a historically and geographically situated politics of place, one grounded in Quebec’s unique community action model and Montreal’s neighborhood roundtables, and the residuals of a once-robust welfare state that support them in the context of increasing austerity. Paradoxically, it is from their position within institutionalized networks, supported by state residuals born of neoliberal devolution, that they constitute a force able to influence municipal and provincial policy agendas and philanthropic missions (Gagnon et al., 2022; Lefèvre and Berthiaume, 2017).
To conclude, the development and everyday governance of social infrastructures–in this case, those in which greenhouses play a functional role–is rife with structural challenges, and increasingly so in the age of austerity urbanism. Montreal’s solidarity greenhouses not only illustrate the tensions arising in networked governance of urban food infrastructures, but also point to the importance of both state residuals and the strategic collaborations needed to bring together partners who share a common vision and whose political and social capital is complementary yet balanced. The situated power of place that emerges from such a configuration–and from its historical antecedents–appears vital to implementing and maintaining a more just vision of green urban development.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
We are grateful to Jackson Dos Santo Brito, Sophie Lavoie, and Sugir Selliah for their assistance at various stages of this research, and to our interviewees for sharing their experiences with us. We would also like to thank Jasmin Raymond, Éric Duchemin, and the rest of the researchers and students involved in the CommunoSerre project.
Ethical considerations
The study was approved by the research ethics board of the INRS (certificate no. 21-617) on 13 August 2021.
Consent to participate
All participants provided written informed consent prior to participating.
Author contributions
NM: conceptualization, formal analysis, investigation, methodology, project administration, supervision, writing–original draft, writing–review & editing. SLVN: conceptualization, formal analysis, investigation, methodology, supervision, writing–original draft, writing–review & editing. CG: formal analysis, writing–original draft, writing–review & editing. FB: investigation, writing–original draft. CFC: investigation, writing–review & editing.
Funding
The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was funded by an internal grant from the Institut national de la recherche scientifique (Concours INRS COVID-19), with additional support from the Villes Régions Monde network, which is funded by the Fonds de recherche du Québec.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.