Between Promise and Performance

Abstract

Controlled-environment horticulture is one of several automation technologies emerging as possible ways of guaranteeing the future of food production. However, studies on the implications of horticulture’s infrastructuralization for urbanization remain limited in literature. This article presents an exploratory study that examines the Dutch agro-industrial cluster of Westland. We draw on semi-structured interviews to understand emerging networks and socio-technical systems and identify spatial and environmental outcomes of automation. Analysis around the themes of technology, land, energy, and labor revealed spatial tensions, limitations of technologies, capital concentration, and accelerating technological diffusion. We conclude that automation technologies affect scalability, increase the need for space, and call greenhouse’s sustainability claims into question given the distinct disparities between an enclosed artificial and technologically intensive inside and a natural outside.