Nathan McClintock

• MS, PhD
• Professor (Full) at National Institute of Scientific Research

Anthropogenic lead (Pb) is widespread in urban soils given its widespread deposition over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries via a range of point-and non-point sources, including industrial waste and pollution, leaded paint, and automobile exhaust. While soil scientists and urban ecologists have documented soil Pb contamination in cities aro...

Unsanctioned guerrilla gardens, long a feature of North American cities, are frequently planted as radical challenge to conventional urban land use. Over the past decade, a number of community-led garden projects – projets citoyens – have appeared on sidewalks and in vacant lots, and alleys of Montreal, Quebec’s inner-core neighborhoods under the b...

As municipalities across the global North highlight urban agriculture as a marker of their ‘greenness’, how can we best understand how the spaces and practices of urban food production are governed? This article develops an analysis of urban agriculture as a complex site of governance in which numerous interests engage. We underscore the politics o...

This paper addresses the alliance between some urban agriculturalists, developers, and the local state in promoting a certain type of 'green urbanism 'through what we call' impermaculture,'. Impermaculture is a model of urban agriculture whereby some urban farmers approach their impermanence-the possibility of their operations being replaced by hig...

Drawing on research conducted in three North American cities renowned for their commitment to sustainability – Portland, Vancouver, and Montreal – I illustrate how practitioners and entrepreneurial ‘growth machine’ actors alike employ urban agriculture as a means of valorising vacant properties. Municipal officials cash in on the symbolic sustainab...

Problem, research strategy, and findings: We draw on a multidisciplinary body of research to consider how planning for urban agriculture can foster food justice by benefitting socioeconomically disadvantaged residents. The potential social benefits of urban agriculture include increased access to food, positive health impacts, skill building, commu...

In this chapter, we aim to understand debates around urban food studies in Montreal and Vancouver by focusing on four issues: food policy, food security, urban agriculture, and food deserts. We identified food policy as a key theme given its growing importance in urban studies and planning (see Morgan, 2014; Rickards et al., 2016) and in light of t...

The past few years have seen a groundswell of geographic scholarship on settler colonialism and its manifold articulations with the urban, from the historical development of cities to ongoing logics and practices of colonization and resistance alike. Given this growing attention to “settler-colonial urbanism” – as well as concerns that a focus ther...

A variety of agricultural conservation trends have gained and lost favour throughout the years, with farm bills in the United States often influencing which conservation practices are implemented. This paper explores the consequences of a set of conservation techniques loosely defined as “no‐till agriculture,” focusing on their implementation and a...

Introduction Among the brick warehouses and new-build condos of Montreal's hip Mile-Ex neighbourhood, a group of musicians leads a parade a few dozen strong. The intergenerational crowd comes to a stop and circles together in a gravel-covered vacant lot, chattering happily and bouncing in time to the bass drum and snare, while the band's clarinets,...

This book provides an innovative lens to consider contemporary urban challenges, taking as its point of departure two overlapping claims. The first is that although the topics of ruins and vacant spaces have been widely discussed in the urban studies literature, their role in the production of both urban landscapes and the economic, social and cult...

In this discussion piece, eight scholars in geography, urban planning, and agri-food studies from the United States (US) and France engage in a bi-national comparison to deepen our collective understanding of food and land justice. We specifically contextualize land justice as a critical component of food justice in both the US and France in three...

Through a case study of a community orchard in an affordable housing neighborhood in Portland, Oregon, we examine how the involvement of an outside nonprofit organization can transform the very notion—and composition—of community. We illustrate how the internal structures and day-to-day practices of a nonprofit privileged participation by more affl...

While many human geographers maintain a long-standing interest in historical analysis, we believe that there is a need to more explicitly examine the theories, methods, and, ultimately, the stakes of such work. For this forum, we invited five geographers to reflect on their own approach to historical analysis and its implications for scholarly and...

Hedgerows, flowering strips, and natural areas that are adjacent to agricultural land have been shown to benefit crop production, via the provision of insect pollinators that pollinate crops. However, we do not yet know the extent to which bee habitat in the form of urban gardens might contribute to pollination services in surrounding crops. We exp...

Recent scholarship on urban agriculture (UA)—the production of food in cities—argues that UA can both undergird and resist capitalist accumulation, albeit often at different spatio‐temporal scales. Scholarship that explicitly examines how UA, capitalist development, and racial difference work through one another, however, is less extensive. In this...

http://www.revue-urbanites.fr/10-mcclintock-soulard/

Urban agriculture (UA), for many activists and scholars, plays a prominent role in food justice struggles in cities throughout the Global North, a site of conflict between use and exchange values and rallying point for progressive claims to the right to the city. Recent critiques, however, warn of its contribution to gentrification and displacement...

While a growing body of scholarship identifies urban agriculture’s broad suite of benefits and drivers, it remains unclear how motivations to engage in urban agriculture (UA) interrelate or how they differ across cities and types of organizations. In this paper, we draw on survey responses collected from more than 250 UA organizations and businesse...

In this chapter, examine the location of ethnic food cart owners within Portland, Oregon’s food cart scene, and within the broader paradigms of local food and sustainability for which the city is known. Through an inventory of food carts, interviews with cart owners, and a case study of the Portland Mercado food cart pod, we explore how the everyda...

Aspects of the urban food truck phenomenon, including community economic development, regulatory issues, and clashes between ethnic authenticity and local sustainability. The food truck on the corner could be a brightly painted old-style lonchera offering tacos or an upscale mobile vendor serving lobster rolls. Customers range from gastro-tourists...

https://www.acme-journal.org/index.php/acme/issue/view/104

Problem, research strategy, and findings: We draw on a multidisciplinary body of research to consider how planning for urban agriculture can foster food justice by benefitting socioeconomically disadvantaged residents. The potential social benefits of urban agriculture include increased access to food, positive health impacts, skill building, commu...

As cities take center stage in developing and brokering strategies for sustainability, examining the uneven distribution of green infrastructure is crucial. Urban agriculture (UA) has gained a prominent role in urban greening and food system diversification strategies alike. Despite that it is the preeminent form of food production in North America...

Interest in food movements has been growing dramatically, but until recently there has been limited engagement with the challenges facing workers across the food system. Of the studies that do exist, there is little focus on the processes and relationships that lead to solutions. This article explores ways that community-engaged teaching and resear...

Portland, Oregon is renowned as a paradigmatic “sustainable city”. Yet, despite popular conceptions of the city as a progressive ecotopia and the accolades of planners seeking to emulate its innovations, Portland’s sustainability successes are inequitably distributed. Drawing on census data, popular media, newspaper archives, city planning document...

As interest in urban agriculture sweeps the country, municipalities are struggling to update code to meet public demands. The proliferation of urban livestock—especially chickens, rabbits, bees, and goats—has posed particular regulatory challenges. Scant planning scholarship on urban livestock focuses mostly on how cities regulate animals, but few...

A recent opinion piece rekindled debate as to whether geography's current interdisciplinary make-up is a historical relic or an actual and potential source of intellectual vitality. Taking the latter position, we argue here for the benefits of sustained integration of physical and critical human geography. For reasons both political and pragmatic,...

As urban agriculture grows in popularity, researchers are attempting to quantify its potential contribution to local food systems. We present the results of a vacant land inventory conducted in collaboration with the HOPE Collaborative, a multi-stakeholder, community-based initiative in Oakland, CA, USA. Vacant lots, open space, and underutilized p...

For many activists and scholars, urban agriculture in the Global North has become synonymous with sustainable food systems, standing in opposition to the dominant industrial agri-food system. At the same time, critical social scientists increasingly argue that urban agriculture programmes, by filling the void left by the “rolling back” of the socia...

As urban agriculture grows in popularity throughout North America, vacant lots, underutilized parks, and other open spaces are becoming prime targets for food production. In many post-industrial landscapes and in neighborhoods with a high density of old housing stock, the risk of lead (Pb) contamination at such sites is raising concerns. This paper...

Urban agriculture (UA) is cropping up in backyards, vacant lots, rooftops, and city parks across North America. Despite popular interest, zoning often serves as an obstacle to UA's expansion. In this reflective case study, we document the efforts of the Oakland Food Policy Council (OFPC) to develop recommendations for urban agriculture zoning in Oa...

Background/Question/Methods While efforts to integrate social and biophysical sciences are growing more popular (notably through growing interest in coupled human and natural systems and sustainability science), critical social science frameworks such as urban political ecology remain strangers to environmental science and urban ecology research....

Background/Question/Methods While the dominant ecosystem services framework may assist diverse stakeholders in making trade-off decisions in socio-ecological systems, it is not without limitation. Existing critiques of the dominant ecosystem services framework bring attention to some of its shortcomings, such as its reliance on a stock-flow frame...

Documents how racial and social inequalities are built into our food system, and how communities are creating environmentally sustainable and socially just alternatives. Popularized by such best-selling authors as Michael Pollan, Barbara Kingsolver, and Eric Schlosser, a growing food movement urges us to support sustainable agriculture by eating fr...

Urban agriculture (UA) is spreading across vacant and marginal land worldwide, embraced by government and civil society as source of food, ecosystems services and jobs, particularly in times of economic crisis. ‘Metabolic rift' is an effective framework for differentiating UA's multiple origins and functions across the Global North and South. I exa...

The Jóór (Dior) soils of Senegal's Peanut Basin are inherently low in organic matter, limiting yields of millet and other crops and threatening the food security of smallholders. Focus groups and interviews were conducted in eight villages to characterise the site-specific fertility management by farmers in the Peanut Basin. Results of the qualitat...