I often wonder about our relationship to nature in the city. In 2017, I went on a quest to discover the gardens of Montreal. Born in the countryside, I had the preconceived idea that in the city, concrete was everywhere and people did not garden. Through this photo project, I aimed to illustrate the contrast between vegetation and built environment.
I learned that there were actually a ton of greening projects in Montreal, and that behind the austere busy streets were found alleys greener than the Botanical Garden. All in all, about half of the Montreal population say they grow food at home.
So I wanted to know more about these nature lovers in the city and understand their motivations to provide time, space and money to make a greener city. Because while research on urban agriculture identifies food security and the opportunity to save money as motivating factors to practice it, it seemed obvious to me that those were not the main motivations in Montreal – given the available space, harsh winters and diverse offer of the market.
I spoke with several Montreal gardeners to understand their motivations. In addition to being a productive and rewarding hobby, urban gardening often shows a need to break with the modern heritage of the city and our relationship to consumption. Urbanization, limiting our link with nature, has brought us into a world where efficiency and productivity reduce us to mere economic components. The green spaces are a way to put back a little romance in this barren era, each garden as a little poem, a recall to our roots.
I then wanted to give tribune to these gardens and their gardeners, who, in addition to embellishing the city, lead by example and bring us to question ourselves. Greening also helps to reduce heat islands and clean the air, among other benefits, but several challenges arise in urban agriculture – it takes an average of 3 years to get a parcel in one of the 97 Montreal community gardens. So, demand is great for new gardens, but despite the great number of potential cultivable spaces, there comes an opposition to the capitalist paradigm – if governance is inclined to favor access to land for profit-generating initiatives, it seems ill-equipped to respond to a situation where citizens rather value land for its use value, and sometimes even aspire to reduce their paid work time in order to self-produce their food… or simply to be a poet.
cocogreen 