Research notes

• Terezie Lokšová: Public Participation in Czech Cities: Democratic Deficit and the Monolithic West

  Terezie Lokšová investigates how formal techniques for involving the public in the planning and designing of buildings and public spaces spread throughout Czech cities. Current practices are often based on approaches that various organisations imported from abroad, which emphasise the democratisation of society more than the architectural aspect. This note explains why the origin of these approaches and their transfer to the Czech environment might interest us and why it is worthwhile to conduct additional research.

• Anja Decker: The space behind the garden - Inconspicuous land-related care in Czechia

  Anja Decker takes a close look at several examples of informal interventions in the material and organic environment she encountered during fieldwork in rural and suburban Czechia. Walking with her interlocutors across the area immediately behind their gardens, she learns how they creatively engage with the land bordering their private property. Among other things, they enable and maintain the accessibility of woodland, protect trees, erect visual barriers and establish productive gardens. While these actions arguably have immediate and rather significant effects, subvert ownership rights and anticipate the needs of human and non-human agents, her interlocutors present them as unspectacular, self-evident and matters-of-course practices. The author elaborates on the potential of exploring such inconspicuous practices when investigating informal, land-related acts of care and asks in what respect they can widen our understanding of political participation.

• Petr Jehlička: The mystery of the missing food waste

  For Petr Jehlička, household food waste is a fascinating research topic. Better understanding of food waste is key to society’s ability to limit climate change and food insecurity. A string of projects recently completed by Czech academics have searched for answers to the question about the ways of reducing the volume of household food waste. In the light of these projects’ finding that Czechs produce 40% of the European Union’s average household food waste, in this first ‘research note’ by CESCAME, Petr proposes to turn this question on its head and ask: How is it that Czech households produce so little food waste? It’s really important to know, because disseminating this know-how throughout the EU has a potential to significantly contribute to meeting the Union’s target of halving the amount of food waste by 2030. To resolve this puzzle, Petr looks for the clues in the sphere of everyday life and routinised behaviours, rather than in the field of policy initiatives or learned intentionality.

Papers

• Jehlička et al.: Chinese food self‑provisioning: key sustainability policy lessons hidden in plain sight

  This article takes the work of Petr Jehlička and his colleagues on urban food self-provisioning (FSP) to China and argues that progress in sustainability scholarship can be accelerated by embracing a greater diversity of framings of sustainability.

• Slavomíra Ferenčuhová: Multiple and regionally specific organizational forms of urban studies?

  An article commentary written by Slavomíra Ferenčuhová appeared in the newly established journal Dialogues in Urban Research.

• Bouzarovski et al.: Forum: Russia, Europe and the colonial present: the power of everyday geopolitics

  Slavomíra Ferenčuhová has contributed to a collective article that was written as a response of seven different authors to Stefan Bouzarovski’s original article. The forum discusses Bouzarovski‘s arguments, further develops the topic of everyday geopolitics and analyses infrastructural relations between Russia and Europe in the context of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

• Petr Vašát: Quasi-household economy: Rethinking homelessness in post-socialist Pilsen and beyond

  Relying on a combination of long-term ethnographic research in the city of Pilsen, the paper repositions homelessness in existing cities by highlighting the importance of transformative economic agency.

• McGreevy et al.: Sustainable agrifood systems for a post-growth world

  Petr Jehlička was part of the collective that prepared this perspective paper which highlights the importance of East European informal food economies for the post-growth food system. Sustainable agrifood systems are critical to averting climate-driven social and ecological disasters, overcoming the growth paradigm and redefining the interactions of humanity and nature in the twenty-first century. This Perspective describes an agenda and examples for comprehensive agrifood system redesign according to principles of sufficiency, regeneration, distribution, commons and care. This redesign should be supported by coordinated education and research efforts that do not simply replicate dominant discourses on food system sustainability but point towards a post-growth world in which agroecological life processes support healthy communities rather than serving as inputs for the relentless pursuit of economic growth. Download the article here.

• Daněk et al.: From coping strategy to hopeful everyday practice: Changing interpretations of food self‐provisioning

  While alternative food networks (AFNs) have become the leading conceptualisation of sustainable food systems, vibrant scholarship on food self-provisioning (FSP) in Central and Eastern Europe has remained confined to the geopolitical region it investigates. This article proposes the understanding of FSP as a more radical variant of AFNs given its more substantial environmental and social impact (FSP is more widespread, socially inclusive, and less dependent on market transactions). By uncovering the epistemological underpinnings of these different framings of FSP and exploring their implications for food practices on the ground, this article draws general lessons for scholarship aiming to advance food system transformation.

Book chapters

• Slavomíra Ferenčuhová: Overcoming the Limitations of Comparative Urban Research in the (Post-) Socialist Context

  This chapter focuses on how a wider historical context can considerably constrain comparative research in urban studies in a particular locality at a particular time. Yet, constraining conditions may also stimulate a search for alternative strategies to develop dialogues across regions and borders.

• Chelcea, Ferenčuhová and Bădescu: Globalizing postsocialist urbanism

  The chapter argues that in the debates about the project of “global urbanism”, it is important to take into account knowledge from the research of the so-called post-socialist cities in Central and Eastern Europe. The chapter draws attention to three points which should be included in these discussions.

Special issues

• Urban Geography, Volume 42, Issue 9 (2021)

  In this special issue, the editors turn our attention to cities in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) in an attempt to discuss homelessness and social change through these cities’ specific historicity and their story of transition from state-socialism to a, mostly, neoliberalized global economy.

Conference special sessions

• 2022 RSA CEE Conference Special Session: Urban informality practices in Central and Eastern Europe: Agents of globalisation?

  CESCAME organised a special session at the RSA Central and Eastern Europe Conference: Bridging Old and New Divides: Global Dynamics & Regional Transformations in 2022 in Leipzig.

Conference keynotes

• Petr Jehlička: East European households’ resource-use practices: Learning from the epistemic periphery?

  Headliner talk at the "Transformations Community European Hub Conference" in Prague, 12 – 14 July 2023.

• Petr Jehlička: Urban agriculture as an already existing sustainability: Lessons from the epistemic peripheries’

  Keynote at the ‘Feeding the melting pot: agroecological urbanism for inclusive and sustainable food practices’ - AESOP – Sustainable Food Planning Conference, Ares University, Almere, 19 – 22 October 2022.

• Petr Jehlička: East European diverse food systems: Learning from the periphery?

  Keynote lecture at the conference „Food, Wasted Food and Future" April 28, 2022 at the Faculty of Business and Economics, Mendel University in Brno.

Conference presentations

• Terezie Lokšová: Consultants as important policy mobility actors: the evolution of participatory place-making in Czech cities

  The paper was presented 20 September 2023 at the 10th International Urban Geographies of Post-Communist States Conference (CATference) in Rīga as a part of the Session 7: Emerging processes of place-making: the production of space and the multiplicity of actors involved in Cities after Transition.

• Petr Jehlička, Huidi Ma, Tomáš Kostelecký, Joe Smith: Chinese home and guerrilla gardening: The importance of preventing the loss of already existing sustainability

  Presentation at the international workshop ‘Crisis, climate and challenges & opportunities of urban agriculture’ at the Haag Institute of Social Studies, 19. 10. 2022.

• CESCAME collective: Innovative Practices at the Intersection of Urban Formality and Informality: The Case of Central European Cities and ‘Inconspicuous Innovations’

  The paper was presented as a part of our special session at the '2022 RSA Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) Conference Bridging Old and New Divides: Global Dynamics & Regional Transformations' in Leipzig.

• Anja Decker: Informal farmers and alternative food networks: Ambiguous entanglements in rural peripheries

  The paper was presented at the '2022 RSA Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) Conference Bridging Old and New Divides: Global Dynamics & Regional Transformations' in Leipzig.

• Lucie Sovová, Petr Jehlička: Garden Time and Market Time: Finding Seasonality in Diverse Food Economies

  The paper was presented at the '2022 RSA Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) Conference Bridging Old and New Divides: Global Dynamics & Regional Transformations' in Leipzig.

• Slavomíra Ferenčuhová, Anja Decker, Petr Jehlička: Unintentionally sustainable consumption in households in Central and Eastern Europe: environmental ‘inconspicuous innovations’

  The paper was presented at the RN05 midterm conference Consumption, Justice and Futures: Where do we go from here? in Oslo in August 2022.

• Slavomíra Ferenčuhová, Petr Kouřil, Michal Šimeček: Mapping the history of prefabricated wooden architecture in post-socialist countries: from archival research to automatic detection using open map sources and back again

  The paper was presented 29 June 2022 at the 9th International Urban Geographies of Post-Communist States Conference, also called CATference, in Budapest.

• Terezie Lokšová: The journey of one(?) innovation - participatory design in the Czech local governance

  The paper was presented 29 June 2022 at the 9th International Urban Geographies of Post-Communist States Conference, also called CATference, in Budapest.

• Petr Jehlička: East European households’ resource-use related practices: Learning from the periphery?

  The paper was presented 29 June 2022 at the 9th International Urban Geographies of Post-Communist States Conference, also called CATference, in Budapest.

• Petr Jehlička: East European diverse food systems: Learning from the periphery?

  Keynote lecture at the conference „Food, Wasted Food and Future" April 28, 2022 at the Faculty of Business and Economics, Mendel University in Brno.