The workshop aims to bridge the gap between theoretical frameworks and empirical findings in urban scholarship and environmental studies, while stimulating a comparative approach within these fields.

For both in-person and online participation, please register here. The link to the online meeting will be sent by 2.10. In case of any technical complications, please contact Karel on this email: 471344@mail.muni.cz.

Location: Institute of Ethnology, Czech Academy of Sciences (Na Florenci 3, 110 00 Praha 1) and online.

The event brings together researchers driven by the challenges of “green transitions”, specifically—though not exclusively—within the Central and Eastern European urban context. By inviting scholars from Tallinn University (project “From Transition to Transformations”), the Leibniz Institute for Research on Society and Space (IRS), Erkner (project “Urban Heat Transition”), alongside other specialists in the field from Technical University Vienna and Masaryk University in Brno we aim to present topical work and deliberate on our findings. Ultimately, the event is designed to foster knowledge exchange and future research cooperation.

The event marks the final year of the project “Inconspicuous Innovations and Resilience in the Urban Context”. Rather than merely presenting the culmination of five years of research, it serves as a collaborative forum for sharing experiences and discussing the complexities of researching socio-environmental change with other experts in the field.

Keynote lecture

Margaret Haderer (TU Vienna)

12.30 – 13.30

Heatwaves, floods, and wildfires affect cities and their inhabitants. At the same time, cities—and the socio-ecological practices that underpin their production and reproduction—shape relations to (non-human) nature. Despite this deep interrelation between the social and the ecological (Latour 1994; Haraway 2016; Swyngedouw 2009; Heynen et al. 2006), urban sociologists continue to frame the two as either contradictory (Rice et al. 2020b) or paradoxical (Holm 2011; Anguelovski et al. 2018). Urban sociology tends to focus on one side of the relationship between society and nature that underpins everyday life in the city—shaped by housing, mobility, work, care, and recreation: the social. A typical example of this socio-centrism is the rich (and, without doubt, important) literature on green gentrification (Cucca et al. 2023). It highlights the negative social impacts of greening initiatives on vulnerable groups but leaves the question of “how we can implement the needed actions against climate change” (Cucca et al. 2023, p. 292) largely unanswered. This one-sided focus on the social when engaging with crises that are simultaneously social and ecological is both astounding and unproductive. It is astounding because theorizing and empirically studying socionatures has long shaped neighboring sub-disciplines such as science and technology studies and urban political ecology—seemingly without fundamentally transforming the epistemic foundations of urban sociology itself. It is unproductive because socio-centrism stands in the way of not only providing answers but also asking the right questions about what sustainable urban society–nature relations would look like with regard to housing, mobility, work, and beyond. In fact, a socio-centric urban sociology runs the risk of reiterating the nature–society divide—the dualism between the social and the natural—that has contributed to the emergence of socio-ecological crises such as climate change in the first place. In my contribution to the conference, I will first make visible the socio-centrism of urban sociology (and, arguably, German sociology in particular) by revisiting key texts in urban sociology. I will then outline what overcoming society-nature divides may look like—both conceptually and empirically. To do so, I will revisit and mobilize research on social metabolisms (see Wachsmuth 2012). After having established a non-dualistic socio-natural lens, I will apply it to housing research, a research strand that is a key part of urban sociology. I will conclude by illustrating the shifts a non-dualistic lens entails regarding the questions we may ask about housing and the kinds of answers we may provide with a view to greening housing. The backdrop of this contribution is a Habilitation that is, from a disciplinary perspective, squarely located at the intersection of urban and environmental sociology.

13.30 – 13.45

Coffee break

Session 1

13.45 – 15.15, Chair: Tomáš Hoření Samec

Petr Jehlička (Czech Academy of Sciences)

The exponentially growing scholarship on household food waste is based on research conducted in a limited number of affluent and wasteful societies in Western Europe and North America, the world’s epistemic centre. Research into household food waste in these contexts is driven by the desire to find ways to reduce its amount. Epistemically, it rests on a set of rarely articulated suppositions that reflect the social context of the societies in which it originates. These include the assumption that people are inherently wasteful, that household food waste originates exclusively from food purchased in the retail sector, that the type of place in which households are embedded plays a limited or no role in the amount and composition of food waste, and that seasonal variations in waste production are unimportant. However, these social contexts offer limited potential for understanding practices that may curb or prevent wastefulness. After all, few researchers would consider a country with high car use an ideal social context for researching ways to counter car dependence.

Drawing on research conducted across a diverse range of urban environments in the epistemically peripheral Czechia (Jehlička et al., 2025; Jehlička et al., forthcoming), this presentation departs from the usual research assumptions. That per capita household food waste in Czechia is roughly half the EU average of 72 kg annually suggests the possibility of placing frugality, not wastefulness, at the centre of food waste scholarship. Accordingly, the presentation uncovers surprising factors and associations behind the frugal use of food as a resource. Instead of the atemporal, linear household food waste journey that begins with food purchases, it proposes an approach informed by the profound seasonality in the quantity and composition of food waste and by the garden’s function as both a source and a sink of waste. Furthermore, it argues that household food waste should be investigated as part of a complex food system that in many social contexts in and beyond Eastern Europe involves interactions between market and informal food sources, including food produced in the garden and received as gifts.

Matthias Bernt and Lisa Vollmer (Leibniz Institute for Regional Geography)

As urban housing systems are increasingly mobilised to meet decarbonisation targets, energy retrofits have become a key policy instrument. At the same time, housing affordability and tenure security remain under acute pressure. This paper examines how German housing policy on energy retrofits in the rental sector reshapes both processes simultaneously, focusing on the regulatory instrument of the Modernisierungsumlage and its interaction with rent regulation across divergent housing market contexts.

We analyse how this policy constellation structures incentives for landlords and produces two distinct but interrelated outcomes. In high-demand housing markets, energy-efficiency upgrades are strategically used to legitimise substantial rent increases, thereby fuelling displacement pressures and processes of low-carbon or “green” gentrification. In low-demand markets, by contrast, landlords’ economic incentives to undertake energy-saving retrofits are weak, as renovation costs cannot be recovered through higher rents. Here, inefficient buildings remain unmodernised, locking tenants into high energy consumption and exposing low-income households to persistent or worsening energy poverty.

We argue that these outcomes are not accidental side effects but stem from the same regulatory logic. Rather than directing investment towards the most energy-inefficient stock—as envisioned by EU climate policy—current regulations channel retrofitting activity towards dwellings with the greatest rent-extraction potential, while leaving the worst-performing buildings untouched. The result is a dual failure: decarbonisation measures intensify socio-spatial inequalities in dynamic markets, while climate and social goals are simultaneously undermined in weaker markets.

By foregrounding this twofold effect, the talk contributes to debates on the eco-social paradox of green housing transitions. It highlights the need for alternative regulatory and financing arrangements that can decouple emissions reduction from rent increases, while ensuring that low-income tenants benefit from, rather than bear the costs of, the transition to low-carbon housing.

Lucie Galčanová Batista, Vojtěch Pelikán and Denisa Červeňáková (Masaryk University)

The presentation will briefly outline the gap in the current age-friendly cities and communities research agenda and the contemporary attempts to fill it, which mostly narrow their focus on the health consequences of climate change and urban ageing. It will be followed by outlining research results from interviews with older urban (and rural) residents living in three climatically distinct regions in the Czech Republic, focusing on how they describe and interpret their environmental experiences, the adaptation strategies they employ, and whether and how they interpret them as climate-related. Finally, it will explore the relevance of the biographical contextualisation of current experiences in (post)socialism and how older research participants use the past as a meaningful reference for constructing their narratives of climate vulnerability, resilience and intergenerational responsibility.

15.15 – 15.45

Coffee break

Session 2

15.45 – 16.50, Chair: Terezie Lokšová

Tauri Tuvikene (Tallinn University)

Transition is a keyword to mark the global shift from a fossil-fuel-intensive economy to a more sustainable one. Yet similar historical aspirations for transition, such as 1990s postsocialism, highlight the non-linear, unpredictable, and multi-directional character of change, urging us to acknowledge conflicting and turbulent transformations. Thus, the ongoing research project this talk introduces asks us to intersect energy and postsocialist transitions to better attend to inequalities and polarisations, including questions of livelihoods and securities.

Raili Nugin and Liste Lehari (Tallinn University)

Ida-Virumaa, Estonia’s predominantly Russian-speaking industrial region bordering Russia, bears the legacies of several major historical transformations. Soviet industrialisation and postwar migration profoundly altered its demographic and linguistic landscape, creating a predominantly Russian-speaking region where, in Narva, only around 7 per cent of residents identify Estonian as their native language. The restoration of Estonian independence subsequently reconfigured questions of citizenship, language and belonging. Today, the region is again undergoing far-reaching change. The green transition away from oil shale is reshaping the economic and social foundations on which the region has long rested, transforming employment prospects and unsettling an industrial identity built over generations. At the same time, the transition to Estonian-language education increases the importance of Estonian proficiency. Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, both transitions have also become intertwined with heightened security concerns.

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted by both authors in Narva, we examine how these simultaneous, largely top-down transitions intersect in everyday experiences of language, work and belonging. Both may be experienced as transformations imposed from outside the region and interpreted through earlier experiences of political change. Focusing on situations in which speaking Estonian becomes difficult, uncomfortable or contested, we ask how language choice acquires meanings extending beyond communication and becomes connected to changing economic opportunities, belonging and security. We consider whether symbolic violence can help explain these encounters and how green, linguistic and security transitions reshape relations between the region, its residents and the Estonian state. 

Tarmo Pikner (Tallinn University)

Large-scale transitions become grounded in material environments and everyday lives in uneven ways. Alongside the EU Green Deal and the decline of carbon-intensive industries, renewed attempts to justify extractive futures are visible in various European regions and beyond. This paper examines temporalities of socio-ecological precarity and practised commons in Ida-Virumaa, a north-eastern region of Estonia shaped by shrinking oil-shale extraction, Russian speaking population, and geopolitical turbulence. Water assemblages provide an interesting analytical lens for exploring these non-linear dynamics of change by connecting extractive infrastructures, altered ecologies, livelihood insecurities, and the making and unmaking of commons. The paper elaborates the concepts of commoning and historical futures through two tension spheres of transformations: (a) extractive presents and contested energy futures beyond oil shale, and (b) extended dacha allotments, where cultivation and care persist and are reworked. The paper is primarily conceptual, supported by place-based vignettes that reveal the socio-ecological and temporal dynamics of transformations, which are analysed further in the ongoing research project. 

16.50 – 17.15

Closing discussion

For both in-person and online participation, please register here.