In response to the RSA Conference brief’s invitation to think about ‘globalisation as not simply emanating from an assumed centre [and] creating all kinds of peripheries’, we seek submissions on urban informality that aim at pushing this line of thinking further. Inspired by Doreen Massey’s (2004) geographical reasoning, we are looking for submissions that do not consider localised and everyday practices in urban contexts as merely responding to and mitigating the effects of global forces but also as agents in globalising processes. On top of that, we welcome contributions that adopt novel or alternative research perspectives on urban development by theorising from the region of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) or that bring in dialogue research perspectives from CEE with those from the world’s other non-central regions. Specifically, we are interested in research addressing negotiations, improvisations and co-production of practices generated at the intersection of urban formality and informality. The manifestations of urban formality and informality that the session will explore may include, but are not limited to, water management, transport, housing, food provisioning and food waste reduction. Despite their appearance of small scale, marginality, or niche character individually, collectively these practices might amount to a vision with transformative capacity that would allow us to relate CEE to the notion of ‘a progressive sense of region’ (Blumberg et al. 2020). In this claim, the session is inspired by post-colonial calls to incorporate work from ‘outside of the core’ in the production of knowledge. Accordingly, rather than replicating and confirming findings from the centre by research in CEE, the session invites work which challenges and extends extant knowledges and theorisations.

The website of the conference is here, link to the session here.

The abstracts are listed below.

Luca Sára Bródy (KRTK - Centre for Economic and Regional Studies, Hungary)

During the past years in Hungary, several critical organisations and movements have emerged and took on a role in tackling various forms of inequality, from addressing housing problems to seeking municipalist ideals in strengthening participatory mechanisms. The results of the October 2019 local municipal elections provided an opportunity for grassroots initiatives to get more involved in public affairs and forge new alliances with local governments. The current political-economic context of Hungary suggests a peculiar timing for such cooperations. Systemic changes left civil society organisations with a gradually shrinking civic space through maintaining high political dependence, limiting their ability to influence decision-making processes. On the other hand, local governments experience a similar loss of power induced by the centralisation efforts of the 2010s that accelerated in general after the local elections and particularly in the aftermath of the pandemic outbreak in spring 2020. Shrinking municipal and civic space served as an impetus for new types of urban activism. Civil society organisations manoeuvred over this period to promote democratic and transparent mechanisms that carry the potential of larger structural changes. As oppositional forces took power, newly elected leaders promised a more progressive policy environment, rebuilding trust towards civil society organisations. Nevertheless, new municipalist promises have been greeted with varying civil society tactics that include targeting increased recognition among residents and focusing on local embeddedness instead of relying on large donors and funds. Findings suggest that instead of an awaited civic boom, the deepening of existing alliances is occurring.

Agnes Gagyi (University Of Gothenburg, Sweden)

By the 2010’s, urban gardening has been recognized by international bodies like the UN or the EU as an important aspect of climate adaptation and food security. During the pandemic, we saw a boom of bottom-up urban agriculture initiatives. The current (and forseeable) spike in food prices may serve as another push factor, maybe not in core European cities, but already in CEE middle class households. An already detectable growth of popular, informal initiatives may challenge established ways of urban gardening, and produce new, faster moving trends, especially in CEE where a newer layer of Western-type intra-urban gardening is embedded in a broader context of informal food networks and practices.
This paper brings fore lessons from an ongoing fieldwork in urban gardens and related institutions in Budapest. Here, a boom of popular and institutional interest after 2008 has created tens of urban gardens across the city, distributed between two main subtypes: intra-urban projects facilitated by professional NGOs, and larger gardens in socialist districts created or maintained by local governments. The paper focuses on new empirical developments after 2020, which show how recent changes are met by a fuzzy process of multi-scale innovation, not entirely driven by top-down green infrastructure programs or political interests, but also intensely formed by institutional frameworks and engagement, far from a mere informal process. Answering to the panel’s call to think formal/informal and global/local relations in CEE beyond Western models, I discuss these examples from the perspective of ongoing innovation that produces answers to the climate, economic and political crisis working from its interstices. In this, I put specific emphasis on how technical knowledge, personal engagement, and political frameworks are channeled and reassembled in new local constellations of practical politics.

Slavomíra Ferenčuhová, Petr Jehlička, Terezie Lokšová, Anja Decker (CESCAME, Czechia)

Innovative responses to everyday challenges of urban life often appear at the intersection of formality and informality. For example, food provisioning and food waste reduction, water management, housing, or adaptation to the local impacts of climate change, all represent areas where formal, top-down strategies meet with informal, domestic tactics of dealing with everyday tasks. We argue that Central and Eastern European cities and societies abound with routine, domestic everyday practices of individuals and households that, as we claim, represent examples of informal solutions to daily issues. We call certain types of these solutions ‘inconspicuous innovations’, stressing their inventiveness and creativity (e.g., ways of using rainwater, reusing material for construction work, reducing food waste), as well as their potential to substitute or enrich formal solutions.
Our presentation will close the session “SS06: Urban informality practices in Central and Eastern Europe: Agents of globalisation?”. We will outline the concept of ‘inconspicuous innovations’ and explain how it contributes to the aim to recognize the region of Central and Eastern Europe as a source of knowledge needed to respond to global challenges.