The archive · Public & Social · Strategic decision · 2022–2023
Serres de rue turns Montreal's car shelters into passive solar street greenhouses
Montreal's Carrefour Solidaire transformed car shelters into passive solar greenhouses on the road, growing winter produce on land usually given to cars.
Carrefour Solidaire
What it had to solve
Carrefour Solidaire, a Montreal community food centre, wanted to explore sustainable ways of using urban land: a densely populated neighbourhood with little growing space and a long winter, where the street itself is dominated by the car. The question was whether city land could feed people through the cold months.
How it works
Montreal is a dense northern city where street space belongs mostly to the car, and Carrefour Solidaire, a community food centre, wanted to explore sustainable ways of using that urban land. Its question was whether the city could grow fresh produce through the winter in a densely populated neighbourhood.
The project, called Serres de rue — 'street greenhouses' in French — transformed car shelters into passive solar greenhouses and installed them directly on the roads. Placed where cars usually sit, the structures let the sun alone keep crops growing through the cold months, on land the neighbourhood already uses every day.
The result was a working demonstration of an alternative city: winter vegetables growing inside a former car shelter on the road. That image forces residents and the city to reimagine the place of cars in their streets, because the food is there to be walked past. D&AD keeps the work in its awards archive, which records the demonstration rather than harvest figures.
Why it lands
- Growing food where cars normally sit makes the land-use trade-off visible in one glance, with no report needed.
- Passive solar keeps the demonstration true to its own point: the structures work through a winter on sun alone.
- A dense residential location puts both the fresh produce and the proof where the community can actually use them.
- By occupying road space the project forces the question of what streets are for, instead of asking politely for attention.
What it did
The project made its argument physical rather than theoretical: produce growing in winter inside car shelters on the road forces passers-by and the city to reimagine the place of cars in urban land. D&AD keeps the work in its awards archive; the page records no harvest or visitor figures.
What you can take
To question how a city uses contested land, build the alternative in the contested spot: a greenhouse where a car shelter stood argues for itself every time someone walks past.
Since then
D&AD keeps Serres de Rue in its awards archive; the page records no harvest or visitor figures, so the case stands on the demonstration itself — passive solar greenhouses built from car shelters and installed on the road show an alternative use for urban land. The transferable move is to take a contested space and occupy it with a working example, so the argument no longer needs to be made in words.
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