VITALGREENHOUSE analyses sustainability transitions in European horticultural greenhouses. It investigates crop cultivation in greenhouse horticulture as part of a vital ecological landscape in which relationships between multiple plant and animal species are central, and in continuous negotiation. VITALGREENHOUSE project aims to investigate greenhouse industrial agriculture as sites embedded within a long history of human-environment relations, integrating questions of landscape exploitation, digitalization, toxicities, and human and non-human labor. The project seeks to generate new critical perspectives on planetary transformations and advance theoretical debates in critical infrastructure studies and multispecies relations.
The Research Question
This project asks: how is sustainability being conceived and practiced in diverse and competing ways in the greenhouse? To answer these questions, the project deploys an innovative combination of multisited ethnography and more-than-human ethnography.
Greenhouses as Vital landscapes
The research team will compare how sustainability is imagined and performed in two European industrial greenhouse hubs, the Netherlands and Spain. VITALGREENHOUSE departs from envisioning greenhouses as contained and controlled, and instead reconceptualizes them as vital landscapes, sites alive with experimentations, transforming and transformed by their surroundings. Thus, instead of seeing the greenhouse as a technological fix, or presuming sustainability as a universal value, Ibáñez Martín’s approach brings together vital aspects that are usually kept separate,such as the ways growers are required to adoptand experiment with new technologies, workers’ skills and daily practices in caring for the wellbeing of the plants and its ecologies, how people in everyday work and life settings seek to know, evaluate, and respond to toxic exposure in and around the greenhouse, and and the collaborations with other-than-humans such as pollinator bees.