Ordinary and extraordinary greening: Tensions amidst Saint-Henri, Montréal’s development boom

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.