Comprendre la fermeture de l’incinérateur des Carrières

In contrast to many industrialized cities, Montreal stopped incinerating its solid waste more than thirty years ago. The urban ruin of the des Carrières incinerator reminds us that the city of Montreal also chose to burn its household waste for most of the twentieth century. This article explores the factors that explain the abandonment of this waste treatment technology. To do so, it studies the case of the des Carrières incinerator, opened in 1969 and shut down in 1993, the last remnant of solid waste incineration in Montreal. Based on archival documents and interviews, the article identifies several supplementary causes to explain its closing: a lack of investment and maintenance, a difficult economic context leading to difficult spatial choices, competition from largely unregulated peripheral landfill sites, an influential anti-incineration movement, changes in municipal politics characterized by different priorities as well as the gentrification of neighbourhoods adjacent to the incinerator. This case study, at the crossroads of the history of urban environments and deindustrialization studies, analyzes the production of environmental public policy at the municipal level. It contributes to knowledge on deindustrialization by focusing on the role of municipal administrations and urban changes in the closing of waste treatment plants, leading to the export of the environmental consequences of urban lifestyles toward peripheral sacrificed landscapes

Art · Humanities · Political science · Sociology · French Urban and Social Studies

• Explaining infrastructural bifurcation

  Clarence Hatton-Proulx, Clarence Hatton‐Proulx•Journal of Urban Affairs•2025

  Add to list