The world today is facing multiple crises—from climate change and global pandemics to economic uncertainty. Global environmental change, in particular, has introduced new risks and vulnerabilities to urban populations worldwide. Terms like sustainability and transformation/transition have become increasingly common in both academic and public discourse. But what do these concepts really mean in everyday life? How do people respond to the new challenges and risks in their daily routines? Can their activities not only respond to the changes affecting them but also transform the world in which they live? These were the central questions explored at the mid-term conference Micro-practices of Societal Transformation? organized by the CESCAME team of the Institute of Sociology, Czech Academy of Sciences, and held on October 14–15, 2024, in Prague.

The conference adopted a unique format: four topics, two speakers for each topic, over two days. The speakers were chosen intentionally to complement each other in different ways: sometimes thematically or in terms of expertise (Prefabricated Timber Houses from Finland: A Tale of Standardization and DIY Adaptation; Top-down Participation and Informal Civic Action: Marginalization and Potentials of Civic Voices and Practices); at other times to lay the foundation for new research agendas (Diversifying the Framings of Sustainability); or to seek synergies across geographies (The Political Implications of Non-political Informal Practices in Urban Green Spaces: Discussing Stories from the Czech Republic and Estonia). Together, they explored answers to pressing questions about transformations toward more sustainable and resilient cities, particularly from a Central and Eastern European perspective: from repurposing homes and minimizing household food waste to green space care and fostering new forms of civic engagement.

On the first day, Petr Jehlička (CESCAME) and Jonas van der Straeten (Technology, Innovation and Society Group, TU Eindhoven) considered why and how certain sustainable practices remain invisible to both the academic discourse and practical sustainability initiatives. Petr presented a fascinating comparison between two epistemic peripheries, Czechia and China, and shared unique data on urban food self-provisioning. According to Petr, the official sustainability discourse assumes a trajectory toward a future associated with more sustainable practices and that sustainability knowledge spreads from centers to peripheries worldwide. In other words, innovative food initiatives are thought to emerge in the so-called West and North before propagating to countries and cities in the East and South.

Jonas took a similar approach in examining mobility innovation on the example of the electric rickshaw in Bangladesh. He documented that the transition from fossil fuel-powered to electric mobility—widely promoted as a pathway to a more efficient, affordable, and sustainable transport infrastructure—has occurred earlier and faster in Bangladesh than in Europe or the U.S. Without any national policy support, this shift has been driven by the country’s informal economy. Jonas demonstrated that instead of being promoted as a “green” public transport solution, electric rickshaws are often subject to bans and excluded from electric vehicle policies. The two presentations demonstrated how international sustainability scholarship tends to overlook valuable lessons if they originate in the epistemically peripheral Global East and South. Two interlinked crucial questions emerged from these two presentations: Does making these ‘silent sustainabilities’ visible actually empower them, or might it risk making the already precarious lives of those practicing them even more vulnerable? And if we are to make them visible, then how?

After a short break, Laura Berger (Department of Architecture, Aalto University) and Slavomíra Ferenčuhová (CESCAME) examined the history of standardized timber houses through the production of the Finnish company Puutalo Oy (Timber Houses Ltd.). Laura presented the founding and early expansion of the company, showing that impactful architectural projects are not always famous, large-scale constructions of societal significance, nor do renowned architects only create major works. Laura introduced various timber house designs ranging from those that allowed individuals to build homes of their own style to partially or fully standardized timber homes. Then Laura took the audience on an intriguing geographical journey highlighting locations worldwide where these prefabricated houses were exported and assembled. One surprising destination was Barranquilla in Colombia, where the Finnish designers had overlooked the local challenge posed by Colombian termites.

Socialist Czechoslovakia was another destination for the Finnish timber houses. Slavomíra Ferenčuhová explored the context of this material transfer and the experiences of and adaptations by current residents. According to Slavomíra, the arrival of timber houses in socialist Czechoslovakia was connected to the geographical and social preferences of the economy at the time—urbanization was driven simply by economic production and worker mobility. It is, however, paradoxical and thought-provoking, Slavomíra noted, that timber constructions are often omitted from scientific narratives on socialist construction. Some aspects of the life in these houses have carried over into the present—from a certain social stigma to distinctly material effects associated with wood (e.g., sound transmission). After the second presentation, a lively discussion ensued, dominated by the question of whether people inhabiting these standardized timber houses are aware that they live in a way that is, in some respects, more sustainable—and whether this should be more widely recognized.

On the second day, we joined Anja Decker (CESCAME) and Bianka Plüschke-Altof (School of Natural Sciences and Health, Tallinn University) in exploring practices of informal green space care, production, and community in Czech and Estonian contexts, searching for the potential political implications of such agency. Anja introduced various small-scale expressions of green space care, such as front yard gardening and informal tree-planting efforts in urban areas. These can take many forms and operate at different scales, exemplified by Anja’s informant Michal who has been planting saplings across Prague for many years. What linked the practices was that all her interlocutors considered them as mundane and unspectacular, not as deliberate political interventions into the urban space. Anja argued that these inconspicuous actions and their ‘silent’ mode of social organization significantly impact on urban greenery and thus do entail a certain degree of transformative potential.

For those unfamiliar with these concepts, the topic’s subtleties were perhaps even more vividly illustrated in Bianka’s presentation on urban gardening in Tallinn, a practice often imbued with a rebellious spirit. However, Bianka’s fieldwork challenged this notion through her informant Anton, for whom gardening is not an act of resistance but a deeply emotional effort to connect the human and more-than-human worlds. Anton intentionally avoids collaboration with like-minded individuals, seeing gardening not as a means to an end but as an end in itself. The question that stayed with us after the session was to what extent we should view and discuss these forms of green space care as political actions with a potential to transform society, cities, or even the world.

At first glance, the final session seemed somewhat distanced from the themes of invisible, quiet, and inconspicuous agency because it addressed participation in urban governance. However, it was not entirely detached—the interactions between formal and informal practices are an intrinsic part of how everyday knowledge is implemented, contested, or rejected. In this session, Terezie Lokšová (CESCAME) and Luca Sára Bródy (HUN-REN KRTK Centre for Economic and Regional Studies) reflected on various formal and informal modes of civic engagement in urban governance from an epistemological perspective rooted in the post-socialist context, thus avoiding implicit comparison with the so-called West. Terezie argued that the academic framing of top-down participation in Central and Eastern European cities as democratization hinders our understanding of actors’ motivations and implemented practices. Through her analysis of more than three decades of top-down participatory design and planning in Czech cities, she showed how space for informal, everyday knowledge has been made within the formal processes and how it profoundly evolved in time.

Conversely, Luca presented a bottom-up perspective, critically engaging with existing interpretations of (limited) civic engagement in post-socialist countries. Specifically, Luca challenged the notion that post-socialist countries have “backward” civil societies—inferred from weaker civic engagement in formal institutions and a lower prevalence of the advocacy style of activism—a view rooted in internal cultural mechanisms. Luca also questioned the idea that post-socialist countries adopted Western institutions without considering local conditions. The level of participation, in such cases, is seen as a response to external structural conditions related to transition and the countries’ accession to the European Union. Using post-2008 developments as an example, Luca offered an alternative that emphasizes the importance of understanding individual actors’ motivations and historicizing local resistance and struggles.

The final discussion provided an intellectually enriching experience. However, not everything can be conveyed in writing, so I won’t attempt to do so here. Rather than summarizing, I would like to conclude with a question that not only reflects the themes raised at this exceptional event but also might guide future inquiries: In our fight against epistemic hierarchies, whether by making “silent sustainabilities” visible or by exploring local interpretations, are we inadvertently creating new thematic and geographical barriers? As Hilary Silver (2024) recently noted in her review of Loïc Wacquant’s The Invention of the Underclass, concepts have not only their polysemic dimension, where one concept has various meanings, but also an onomasiological one, where a single idea is expressed through multiple terms. When I hear terms like “quiet sustainability,” I think of Asef Bayat’s (2000) “quiet rebels” or “the quiet encroachment of the ordinary.” And when considering the dilemmas of political agency in green space care, I recall recent discussions around the concept of post-political city (e.g., Beveridge and Koch, 2017). I wonder, then, whether our discussions on quiet sustainability and un/political agency might also benefit from perspectives on sustainable practices arising in subaltern contexts, such as self-built/informal settlements or the lives of unhoused persons. Might the separation of these debates actually be limiting?

In the debate with insights from other geographies, such as Finland, Bangladesh, and China, the presenters together outlined how citizens of CEE countries influence or even transform the world around them. Emerging from the epistemic positions of (post-socialist) Central and Eastern Europe, the knowledge presented provided not only an inspiring guide for researching sustainable practices and fostering a more responsible relationship with a changing world but also conceptual signposts for a more equitable approach to knowledge production. It was an honor to learn from this wonderful group of scholars!

References:

Bayat, A. 2000. From ‘dangerous classes’ to ‘quiet rebels’: politics of the urban subaltern in the global south. International Sociology 15 (3): 533-557.

Beveridge, R. and Koch, P. 2017. The post-political trap: reflections on politics, agency and the city. Urban Studies 54 (1): 31-43.

Silver, H. 2024. Re-labeling the underclass. Dialogues in Human Geography 0 (0). https://doi.org/10.1177/20438206241278736

Global environmental change introduces new risks and vulnerabilities to urban populations, including those in Europe. Whether and how societies are responding and adapting to these challenges are questions of ever-heightening urgency. We believe it is of critical importance to explore the often-overlooked everyday practices through which people ‘quietly’ address these issues and sometimes unconsciously contribute to environmental and social well-being.

Our research uncovers fascinating examples of everyday “inconspicuous” micro-actions that are unintentionally and “quietly sustainable” (Smith and Jehlička 2013; Ferenčuhová 2022). From repurposing homes and DIY reconstructions, to nurturing local green spaces or reducing household food waste, these mundane practices offer valuable insights into fostering a more sustainable world. Without idealising them, we view these practices as sources of ordinary innovations that prioritize reduced resource consumption, mutual aid, recycling, DIY solutions, and sharing.

We also question how these informal practices interact with formal processes and policies aimed at environmental and social sustainability in cities. Do they complement, conflict, or coexist with these larger-scale efforts?

The schedule is based on the Central European Time (CET) and can be downloaded here in PDF format.

12.45 – 13.15 Coffee and welcoming in-person participants

13.15 – 13.30 Welcoming online participants (Slavomíra Ferenčuhová)

13.30 – 15.00

Jonas van der Straeten, Petr Jehlička

Petr Vašát (chair)

This session aims at diversifying the framings of sustainability. Despite the general tendency to perceive the mainstream, eco-modernist notion of sustainability as value-neutral and universally valid, the concept is embedded in West European and North American societal developments (Mincyte 2011). One implication for sustainability scholarship is the prioritisation of market-based solutions to environmental problems. The other is the inclination, stemming from the popularity of theories of difference in the last century and the current neoliberal prioritisation of innovation (Domínguez Rubio 2020), to positively valorise novelty, creativity, and innovation in terms of high-tech eco-modernist solutions in proposed sustainability transformations. In this understanding, sustainability gains are located in a more or less distant future and are associated with future-oriented capacity building, technological innovation, civic participation and mobilization based on learned intentionality. However, the growing urgency of the need to propose responses to the biodiversity and climate crises and the limited effectiveness of techno-fixes push sustainability researchers to consider unconventional lines of thought.

We echo the growing calls for decentring or decolonizing knowledge-making in debates on sustainability transitions. In this session, therefore, we seek to draw attention to the importance of long-established and socially embedded sustainable practices. To that end, we propose four interrelated shifts to the perspective from which to consider sustainability. The first shift rests in the adoption into sustainability frameworks of what we call already existing sustainability-compliant practices. This endeavour requires looking for sustainability in the present, ‘rather than focusing on creating it or simply waiting for it to emerge, in the future’ (Barron 2020). In suggesting this, we are inspired by the desire to emancipate the maintenance of already existing sustainability practices from their invisibility and association with repetition and lack of creativity. The second shift proposes to diversify the notion of sustainability by drawing on findings about these practices from research outside the Western ‘epistemic centre’, i.e. in the Global South and the Global East. The third shift aims at dissociating these already existing sustainability practices from resource scarcity and poverty and at the possibility of connoting them with more positively valorised qualities such as exuberance and enjoyment. Finally, there is a need for a shift to different actors as the currently prevailing focus on self-recognized change agents (NGO, government agencies, development agencies) and ignorance of historically shaped local forms of governance will do little to change the many current misguided sustainability policies. Consequently, drivers of wider transition processes spanning past, present, and future are missing in the research, specifically informal practices, actors, and institutions.

15.00 – 15.30 Coffee break

15.30 - 17.00

Laura Berger, Slavomíra Ferenčuhová

Petr Vašát (chair)

This session explores the multifaceted history of standardized timber houses, focusing on the production of a Finnish company called Puutalo Oy (Timber Houses Ltd.). During the 1940s and 1950s it became one of the largest manufacturers of prefabricated timber houses globally. Some 30 factories of the consortium, situated across Finland, produced annually more than 10,000 buildings, which were delivered to over 30 countries on every continent.

We will present two interconnected narratives: the history of the standardization of timber house production in Finland during the early 20th century and the post-war era, and the subsequent adaptation of these houses by their residents.

First we introduce the design and production of timber houses from the point of view of the Puutalo corporation. From the very beginning, its representatives promoted the notion of flexible standardisation, asserting that each commissioner is free to determine the size and the type of their building, which will also be possible to expand later with use of prefabricated components. We will examine the factors driving this approach and the relationship between standardization and prefabrication.

Next, attention will be shifted to the experiences of residents who have lived in these houses. Through case studies from Czech cities and examples from other global locations, we explore how some of the residents have perceived, interacted with and modified their homes and their materiality and spatial configurations. Specifically, we highlight do-it-yourself reconstructions and repurposing as significant strategies for adapting standardized houses to meet individual and household needs.

By juxtaposing these two narratives, we aim to stimulate a discussion concerning the complex interplay, tensions and synergies between top-down and bottom-up innovations in the realm of housing. The session points out that do-it-yourself modifications are not merely deviations from a standardized ideal but rather integral components of the ongoing evolution of housing practices, especially in the case of prefabricated timber constructions.

17.00 – 17.30 Day 1 closing discussion

9.30 – 9.45 Welcoming online participants (Slavomíra Ferenčuhová)

9:45 - 11:15

Bianka Plüschke-Altof, Anja Decker

Petr Jehlička (chair)

In this session, we would like to present and discuss examples of informal practices in urban green spaces. These could include practices of care, production, gardening and communality. While such practices have in the literature been discussed as political acts of guerilla gardening, rebellion against neoliberal urban governance regimes and creative performances of sustainability-centred values, in the stories discussed here, the main protagonists experience these actions as mundane, everyday practices, or emotional acts of building connections with human and non-human beings. Often, their modes of organisation rather follow an individualistic than a cooperative logic and at times our interlocutors seek to avoid cooperation with other practitioners and institutional actors. While these informal practices might not be intended as political interventions, we would like to discuss the political implications they might nevertheless entail - for spatial planning, community building, environmental management and climate change adaptation more broadly. Which are the political consequences and what conclusions to draw from them? If these are non-intended, then how to deal with them? Whose, if anybody’s, task is it to make these often hidden practices more visible, draw and communicate their political implications - and what are the potentials and risks of directing attention to these practices? Based on stories from fieldwork in the Czech Republic and Estonia, we invite you to jointly discuss these questions with us.

11.15 – 11.45 (12.45) Coffee break and lunch break (individual)

12.45 – 14.15

Luca Sára Bródy, Terezie Lokšová

Slavomíra Ferenčuhová (chair)

This session examines participation in urban governance by focusing on top-down participation, everyday resistance, and citizens’ agency. Firstly, it traces how the local voices have been positioned and channelled through formal involvement. Secondly, the session focuses on the often-overlooked informal character of civic action and its motives to transform institutional politics.

Drawing on qualitative data from more than three decades of Czech participatory design and planning, the session demonstrates how the relationship between the expert approaches and local mundane practices and knowledge has been shaped: how the position of the locals and their knowledge, as well as the notions of good, innovative, relevant participatory practices, developed over time under the influences of mobile policies from the West. The discontinuous history of public involvement illuminates how the potential for including local voices has been selectively constrained.

In the context of recurrent political and institutional crises, formal governance structures often fail to address the needs of local populations, leading citizens to rely on informal networks and practices for survival and resilience. These informal practices provide critical support to communities by filling the gaps left by weakened local governments. The research based on three case studies in Hungarian cities examines how these informal networks function and highlights their importance in sustaining civic engagement and promoting resilience in urban areas. It explores the complex interplay between these informal practices and formal governance structures.

The session aims to overcome the prevailing focus of post-socialist civil society and public participation research on implicit comparisons with the generalised West and on what is perceived as lacking. It problematises the role of the deficiency model and challenges the traditional views of civic action that often overlook the power of informal, everyday practices.

14.15 – 14.45 Coffee break

14.45 – 15.30 Closing discussion