The largest integrated karst area in Carpatho - Balkanides Mt. in Eastern part of Serbia is area of Kučaj – Beljanica. Тhis massif is composed of two separate mountain units - in the north the limestone block of Beljanica, and in the south the vast Kučaj karst plain. According to the unique and rare geoheritage sites and phenomenon as well as rich biodiversity, evaluation criteria and procedure for proclamation of another Serbian national park was launched. The total protected area of international, national, that is, exceptional importance is 45,371.62 ha. Despite the rich natural phenomenon, population growth, composition and distribution are the most important factors of sustainable development of this area. Emigration, depopulation, low birth rates, and high levels of aging marginalize rural areas and put access to basic services at risk. The aim of the paper is to analyze multidimensional relationship between nature protection and straightening demographic potentials in order to achieve combine effects of preserving complex natural rarities and improvement of wellbeing of local communities through the activities related to specific touristic forms (ecotourism, geotourism, adventure tourism etc). This research will include extensive fieldwork with intensive participant observation and a series of structured and semi structured interviews with local population, government representatives, NGOs staff, and other stakeholders involved in the process of sustainable protection and development of rural areas. Final analysis will be complemented with the help of GIS methodology. The starting point of this research is to answer if adequate national protection of the geodiversity and biodiversity of Kučaj and Beljanica Mt. would enable the strengthening of socio-economic activities and sustainable development of local communities.

Rural tourism in Hungary has evolved significantly, driven by urban-to-rural relocations where individuals establish tourism ventures in village settings. These newcomers bring fresh perspectives, resources, and challenges, reshaping rural tourism dynamics. This presentation examines the transformative potential of rural tourism in three Hungarian cases, based on qualitative sociological research (semi-structured interviews and field research), to explore how sustainable tourism can emerge through collaboration and adaptation.

First, we introduce the historical development of rural tourism in these regions, each with unique geographic, cultural, and economic characteristics, analysing how past practices shape the present. Then we analyse the current tourism models, questioning whether a universal framework for sustainable rural tourism exists or if adaptive, context-specific approaches are necessary. A key focus is the role of community cooperation, examining how residents, newcomers, and stakeholders collaborate to balance economic, environmental, and social needs.

Research questions are:

• What motivates or discourages rural communities from engaging with tourism, and how do they perceive its impact?
• Can urban newcomers align their goals with local communities to achieve mutual benefits?
• What mechanisms can regulate tourism for long-term sustainability while resolving stakeholder conflicts?

Findings highlight that sustainable rural tourism offers significant development potential but requires inclusive, adaptive governance structures that prioritize dialogue and iterative decision-making. The case studies reveal both opportunities and limitations, demonstrating how tourism can drive socio-ecological transformation. By situating these local experiences within broader European tourism trends, the research contributes to critical discussions on sustainable tourism transitions, emphasizing the need for nuanced, community-centered approaches to rural development.

Current debates in tourism research highlight the tension between sustainability, the negative effects of ever-growing tourism and socio-economic and ecological contradictions that tourism brings with it in destinations. In this context, Mountaineering Villages in the Alps present themselves as destinations committed to sustainable tourism, aligning with the Alpine Convention’s goals to protect the natural environment of the Alps. These initiatives aspire to integrate tourism with nature conservation by preserving the character of alpine villages including their agricultural and socio-economic structures alongside the natural environment of the alpine mountains.

This contribution explores Mountaineering Village initiatives from the perspective of convivial conservation (Büscher & Fletcher, 2020). Convivial conservation critiques mainstream conservation due to its increasing dependence on market mechanisms and suggest a post-capitalist, socio-environmentally just alternative that overcomes the human-nature alienation, inherent in conventional approaches to conservation. In relation to tourism, understood as market-based instrument that commodifies natural spaces, the convivial approach means the promotion of areas for the creation of long-lasting and engaged human-nature relationships, which overcomes the natural imagination of untouched wilderness and celebrates everyday nature in the familiar environment, as well as the strengthening of democratic decision-making processes in the design of tourism.

Using a qualitative research method, including interviews with experts involved in the decision-making and design of the Mountaineering Villages, this study investigates to what extent the Mountaineering Village initiatives embody radical alternatives and whether they are able to overcome the contradictions of mainstream conservation or are simply another illustration of these contradiction. The convivial conservation framework provides valuable insights into advancing transformative approaches that challenge the root causes of socio-environmental crises affecting the Alps, tourism destinations, and broader societies.

Destination Management Organisations play a crucial role in enhancing residents’ quality of life, a key factor in fostering sustainable and competitive destinations. To achieve this, it is essential to place residents' voices at the forefront of policymaking, ensuring that tourism policies align with the community’s needs and expectations. Moreover, integrating residents’ perspectives into tourism planning and validation processes helps mitigate tourism’s negative impacts while amplifying its benefits. Measuring residents’ attitudes toward tourism development, therefore, becomes a pivotal step in enabling data-driven and community-centered decision-making.

While significant progress has been made in gathering data and developing simple indicators, there is a notable lack of experience in creating composite indicators (index) that provide a multidimensional and cohesive view of residents’ attitudes. This study addresses this gap by building an index to evaluate residents’ perceptions of tourism impacts, offering policymakers a tool to inform decisions.

The research was conducted in Andalusia, Spain. A total of 32 municipalities, representing high, medium, and low levels of tourism concentration across coastal, inland, and urban areas, were selected. In these locations, 3,200 residents participated in a survey that explored perceptions of tourism impacts. The collected data was used to develop a system of simple indicators, which were subsequently normalised, weighted, and aggregated into a single index.

Findings reveal that higher levels of tourism concentration are associated with more negative resident attitudes toward tourism. A deeper analysis highlights that in medium-concentration destinations, residents appreciate the positive economic impact of tourism on the local economy but express concerns about natural resource consumption, increased traffic, and insufficient parking availability. In high-concentration destinations, these concerns are compounded by housing affordability issues, although residents also acknowledge economic benefits, increased investment, and a wider range of leisure opportunities. Conversely, low-concentration destinations exhibit a more favorable perception of tourism, emphasizing its contributions to employment, the municipality’s image, and the availability of recreational activities. The paper concludes with reflections on the political and managerial implications of these findings, offering actionable insights for sustainable destination management.

Our current food regime is inherently unstable and susceptible to crises. Different food initiatives like community-supported agriculture (CSA) have been addressing these crises, mostly in Northern America and Western Europe, for over 50 years. CSA initiatives in these regions have been largely examined within the alternative food network literature, e.g., focusing on their modus operandi or members’ motivations. We have analyzed CSA in three different countries—Switzerland, Czechia and Argentina. While certain mechanisms and motivations are similar, our analysis highlights the importance of context-specific factors in shaping the transformative potential of these alternatives, and the unique challenges they encounter within the current food regime. Drawing on the interdisciplinary theoretical framework of values-based modes of production and consumption, we put our three cases into dialogue and show that (historical) political contexts (authoritarian political regime, (post) socialism, (direct) democracy) and different positions within uneven development influence the current agricultural structure of each respective country and thus the role of CSA within it. Whereas Argentina and Czechia are characterized by export-driven agroholdings with transnational retail chains profoundly shaping domestic consumption in the case of the latter, Switzerland's agri-food system is strongly finance-led but family-farm orientated. Unlike Czechia, Argentina has not fully adopted the Western model of CSA, among other reasons, due to inhibiting high inflation rates. In Czechia, (peri-)urban areas are centers of CSA and women on maternity leave often represent crucial actors since they value healthy food for their children. There is however, similar to the Argentinian case, a lack of solidarity with farmers on the side of consumers in times of economic hardship, and insufficient institutional support of these bottom-up initiatives. The researched Swiss CSA links urban consumers with rural mountain farmers. The spatial distance and members’ required work stays encompassing the physically demanding and time-intensive task of herding goats pose challenges to the participating members and farmers. Membership in this CSA demands a high level of commitment that diverts from the convenience of the dominant food system, limiting the accessibility of this alternative food initiative. Overall, CSAs in all countries struggle reaching larger groups of the population.

Using qualitative sociological methods, this paper investigates the place and role of alternative food systems and sustainable food consumption as they appear in the everyday food consumption of middle-class, shopping community member consumers in Hungary. The paper is part of a larger nationwide project exploring sustainable food and energy consumption patterns in the context of social inequalities, analysing the meanings of sustainability, and food and energy consumption practices for different social groups.

Shopping communities are typically made up of middle-class consumers. Women and families with small children are at the centre of these communities. The central question is: How does the shopping community change the everyday patterns of food consumption of its members? What amounts of food that are being purchased regularly through the shopping community? What limitations and obstacles have been identified by the members? How is the mainstream food system perceived and represented by the members of the shopping community? How do the community and the activities of the community influence the attitudes, perceptions and behaviour of its members towards sustainable consumption and alternative food system in opposition to mainstream food system?

Shopping communities have mushroomed in Hungary in recent years, mobilising different types of communities and services, typically focusing on issues such as health, quality food, sustainability, local awareness, community values and self-help. In spite of this, the share of the alternative food system in the Hungarian food consumption is still very small and limited. This paper is based on participant observation and over 50 semi-structured interviews with members and organisers of shopping communities across Hungary. We analyse four different types of shopping communities, ranging from online markets to community-supported agriculture (CSA), and from well-organised small-town communities to loose, extended networks in Budapest. The study sheds light on the diverse attitudes and perspectives of middle-class consumers towards alternative food systems and sustainable food consumption.

The first results of the analysis show that the main value of the shopping community as an alternative food system is related to health and quality food. However, most consumers also use the mainstream food system in their daily food consumption practices. Only the members of a small, strong community are more focused on sustainable food choices, awareness and behaviour, and tend to use the alternative food system in their everyday food consuming practices.

Framed within debates about moral/affective economies, and based on longitudinal ethnographic research, this paper explores intergenerational exchanges of food and foodstuffs within families in rural South Bohemia. Through a detailed examination of the kinds of foodstuffs that are exchanged, the paper demonstrates how various intra-familial modes of food sharing smoothly combine market-based products with home grown food and include a range of substances; from raw meat via readymade dishes to food waste. Food is given and received as part of everyday, non-conspicuous interactions between kin (mainly women), bordering on other often “invisible” everyday activities such as childcare. The “easiness” of the exchanges, and the strong lines of affect and obligation that underlie this circulation, indicate a local food system that is both flexible and resilient. In a longitudinal perspective, we find that it has been subject to substantial change, though. This includes changes in the food self-provisioning carried out by families - thus the mix between “home grown/bred” and market- based food stuff - and in gendered responsibilities and labour related to food work. The paper discusses some of these changes and their possible implications for the local food system as such.

Food self-provisioning (FSP) is one of the most important legacies of agricultural civilizations. In today’s world of uncertainties, the practice of FSP enhances resilience and promotes sustainable growth. FSP also has the function of creating and altering spaces in both tangible and intangible ways. With the needs for green living, it not only promotes balanced development and a symbiotic relationship between human and nature, but also to transform of existing lifestyles with vitality and creativity.
FSP disrupts and reconnects the dualities of urban/rural and human/nature. Rural life experiences have become increasingly popular among urban residents, who spend their holidays at farmhouses, orchards, and farmers’ markets. Farming-related activities bring people close to nature, where burnt-out urbanites rediscover the integration of the mind and the body through unalienated leisure. FSP is thus viewed as a nurturing practice to enhance one’s vitality, creativity and mindfulness.
The philosophy of FSP also contributes to community building by educating its participants on virtues such as diligence, thrift, and solidarity. During the COVID-19 pandemic, FSP not only relieved the stress of food shortage for many households, but also promoted mutual assistance and friendship among community members.
This article starts with sociological empirical evidence but then moves further to explore the significance of FSP as a bridge for integrating urban and rural development. The author will discuss the future potential of FPS in the framework of sociological imagination, the practical challenges of its popularization in China, and the capacity of “space” as an enabling mechanism for social change. Our conclusion: as a resilient food supply alternative system, FSP can be sure to help people resist climate change and uncertain future, as well as to transform of existing lifestyles with vitality and creativity.

The main purpose of this paper is to create a composite indicator of the extent of overtourism by using optimization (cross-entropy-based rank aggregation), and an objective ranking of 28 European locations declared to be affected by overtourism. Further aim of the paper is to contribute to the establishment of a standard that objectively measures the extent of tourism to produce a dynamic ranking of selected European settlements. The multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) methods were used to rank the 28 overtouristed sites according to 7 criteria (indicators) and 10 years (from 2014 to 2023). The annual changes in the rankings are presented graphically using principal component analysis on a two-dimensional space, referred to as the ‘‘sites’ space.’’ Through the use of the K-means algorithm the sites were clustered based on the level of overtourism. The applied methods with novel rank aggregation contribute to the relevant indicators to overtourism

Besides its functional character, shopping also has notable recreational aspects. Thus, it is not surprising that it is one of the most frequent and favoured activities among tourists. Cities are ideal destinations for tourist shoppers, as they offer the opportunity to combine shopping, sightseeing and various leisure activities. Shopping malls are particularly popular among tourists; some centres are even considered destinations in their own right, as they not only provide diverse retail facilities but also offer various leisure and entertainment opportunities. Understanding the factors that shape the retail experience is a key to the success of shopping centres as well as tourist destinations. As opposed to traditional methods of examining consumers’ opinions on shopping malls – such as questionnaire surveys or interviews – the analysis of online reviews may help to explore a broader range of factors influencing satisfaction.

This presentation aims to introduce the appeal of shopping malls in Budapest among tourists through a quantitative and qualitative analysis of reviews posted by visitors on TripAdvisor, the world's largest travel guidance platform. It evaluates international visitors’ opinions on shopping malls in Budapest and highlights the factors influencing their satisfaction or dissatisfaction with these complexes. By exploring tourists’ opinions, the presentation provides implications for mall operators and destination management organisations to enhance visitors’ shopping experiences thereby increasing the attractiveness of malls and contributing to the competitiveness of Budapest as a destination.

The hypermobility of contemporary societies has been increasingly challenged by interconnected crises in recent years, which have raised awareness about the impact of human mobility on urban systems and his governance. However, mobility remains central in the current hyper-industrial economic system. While attention has largely focused on tourist flows and the extreme touristification of global cities, it is becoming increasingly difficult to separate the effects of tourism from the broader processes of urbanization.

Now days, the urban phenomenon is increasingly to be seen as a processual and emergent assemblage of diverse spatial-temporal practices, challenging traditional notions of fixed, measurable urban units. In this context, hypermobility has become the main organizer of the society, shaping daily experiences. These changes blur distinctions between tourists and residents, mobility and migration, and individuals and places. At the same time, new and significant challenges emerge concerning recognition, multiple-belonging and citizenship, the changes in social morphology, the democratic governance of metropolitan space-times, and the current forms of exploitation in which mobility is a fundamental element.

Recognizing the unprecedented nature of contemporary circulation, this communication proposes a new epistemological framework that integrates insights from six different academic fields, usually read separately, focusing on social reproduction as a core aspect of contemporary processes of accumulation, where circulation (beyond tourism, migration, or commuting) is the central organizing factor.

The first section connects the transformation of urban space-times driven by hypermobility with characteristics of the current economic system. Contributions from the workerism tradition are examined in dialogue with feminist literature, highlighting centrality of social reproduction in space-time production. The framework also engages with recent geographic theories of planetary urbanization, urban assemblages, and intensive heterogeneity, along with new approaches in mobility and tourism studies, time geography, and sectorial studies on temporary populations' impacts in cities, such as touristification, studentification and gentrification.

This communication find that the crises associated with hypermobility are primarily crises of conceptual frameworks, calling for new epistemological approaches to grasp the connection between urban assemblages and human circulation.

Destination choice behaviour is increasingly influenced by online reviews, messages and opinions (E-WOM) about the destination. Online media can significantly impact a tourist destination’s image (Amaro & Duarte 2016). It can also create confusion, increasing the perception of the destination as risky (Chemli et al. 2022). Managing this in the presence of multiple sources of information takes much work. The primary aim of the research is to explore and understand consumer concerns about online space and innovative technologies. We see that the main difference between all age groups is whether they plan to travel abroad or domestically. This seems to be confirmed by international research and our own representative research - which we conducted in September 2024, by the way, with a representative survey of 1,000 Hungarian travelers (by age, gender, occupation, income and place of residence). In general, it was also found that domestic travellers are a bit more courageous. We see that they are more likely to book their own hotel rooms, air or train tickets or programmes than older generations. Also compared to other generations, a much higher proportion of Generation Z youth use AI-based solutions for their bookings than do not. While the average Generation Z young person uses AI 15% of the time, Generation Y only 10% and Generation X only 5% use AI for their bookings. This correlates with the trend of younger people using such technologies at a higher rate than older people.

The focus on the relationship between subjective well-being and social cohesion holds unexploited potential in migration studies. However, conducting quantitative, country-of-birth-based data analysis at the local level presents numerous practical challenges.

This meta-analysis aims to examine large-scale European surveys that have recently explored subjective well-being (SWB), particularly those relevant to our case study on Vienna and Budapest. We will systematically evaluate when, where, and how this multidimensional concept was assessed by EU-SILC, EQLS, ESS, QLECS, VQLS, the Migration Survey of Statistics Austria and the Hungarian microcensus. The analysis will explore the advantages and limitations of these databases regarding sample size, consistency, representativeness, the inclusion of spatial data, and other factors. The main research question is to what extent we obtain similar or differing results when examining the same social phenomenon using different data sources. The phenomenon we tested was the SWB gap between the country-of-birth groups in Vienna and Budapest. The presentation will also reflect on temporal trends and spatial patterns.

Preliminary results indicate that our knowledge is highly fragmented, and direct comparisons of variables across different surveys are rarely feasible. The same concept is operationalised by partly distinct variables, measured on different scales. Furthermore, most databases are still characterized by “methodological nationalism”, which makes comparative analyses at the local level even more challenging. The results also indicate that while Austria boasts one of the highest average life satisfaction score in Europe, the SWB scores of major immigrant groups, remain remarkably lower than those of the native-born population, despite a narrowing gap over the past decade. In contrast, Budapest rank in the EU's bottom quartile for overall life satisfaction, where the native-born population’s SWB lags behind that of the foreign-born.
*** This work was carried out within the framework of the WELLCOH project, which has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions. Grant agreement No. 101066352

This paper examines the aspirations of young people to remain in Governador Valadares, Brazil, a region characterized by a deep-seated "migration culture" and historical emigration to the United States and Europe. While migration studies often prioritize movement, immobility remains underexplored, despite its significance as an active and meaningful decision. This research builds on an emerging body of work reframing the choice to stay as a deliberate, empowering decision rather than a passive default. Drawing from ethnographic research and 17 in-depth interviews conducted between 2022 and 2023, the study explores the complex interplay of socio-economic, cultural, and personal factors shaping immobility among young Brazilians.

The analysis employs the concepts of "retain and repel factors" to investigate why young people prefer staying and how their aspirations for a "good life" challenge dominant migration narratives. Retain factors, such as family ties, emotional belonging, and local engagement in social movements, contrast with repel factors like the risks and uncertainties of undocumented migration, financial instability, and the alienation faced by migrants abroad. These findings highlight that economic motivations alone cannot explain migration decisions. Instead, values like emotional well-being, community connection, and personal fulfillment significantly influence the choice to stay.

Central to this analysis is the concept of "relative endowment," which posits that individuals assess their current circumstances relative to potential alternatives. For many participants, staying allows them to preserve familial and social bonds, maintain inner peace, and contribute to their communities. These subjective evaluations often outweigh the perceived economic advantages of migration. Furthermore, the study challenges conventional assumptions equating immobility with inertia or low aspirations. It argues that choosing to remain is a form of agency, reflecting ambition to cultivate meaningful lives within one's local context.

This paper advances migration studies by integrating subjective well-being and non-economic dimensions into the analysis of immobility. It underscores the importance of understanding diverse interpretations of the "good life," particularly in contexts shaped by strong migration pressures. Ultimately, this research reframes staying as a dynamic and relational process, contributing to broader debates on mobility, aspirations, and social inclusion.

This thesis investigates the identity negotiation processes of young adult asylum seekers during prolonged waiting periods on the island of Lesvos, Greece. Drawing on Dialogical Self Theory (DST) and phenomenological perspectives, the study explores how temporal and spatial dimensions of waiting intersect with identity formation in a liminal island setting. Through qualitative analysis of life stories, the research examines the emotional and psychological impact of indefinite waiting and reveals the emergence of varied identity positions (I-positions), including "I as an asylum seeker," "I as a dreamer," and "I as participating in NGOs." These positions evolve in response to the socio-spatial constraints and interactions encountered during the asylum process.

The findings underscore how the spatiality of Lesvos, as both a physical and symbolic space, profoundly shapes the narratives and identity construction of asylum seekers. Waiting periods are characterized by temporal disruptions—moments of stagnation, rupture, and fleeting hope—that deeply affect personal agency and future aspirations. NGO interactions emerge as pivotal in reshaping participants' perceptions and fostering a sense of agency, though these engagements often remain transient and context-dependent.

Methodologically, the study employs a qualitative approach, including 19 in-depth semi-structured interviews, participant observation, and complementary methods such as photovoice, vignettes and landscape-assisted conversations. These methods provide a multidimensional understanding of identity construction, capturing how individuals navigate the uncertainty and constraints imposed by institutional systems.

This thesis contributes to migration and island studies by emphasizing the intersection of place, temporality, and identity in forced migration contexts. It highlights the critical role of spatial and temporal dimensions in shaping psychosocial processes and the broader implications of asylum policies on identity formation. The study calls for more humane and responsive policy frameworks to mitigate the psychological and emotional hardships experienced by asylum seekers in liminal spaces like Lesvos.

This project explores feelings of belonging and contributes to the understanding of islandness. Considering the potential difficulties associated with moving to a new place, exploring the experiences of home-making and belonging is particularly relevant to island communities that tend to be highly mobile. Its importance is highlighted by Baumeister and Leary, who argued in 1995 that belonging is such a fundamental human need that it forms a motivation permeating our thoughts, behaviours, and feelings. As a case study on the island of Lesvos, forming part of the Greek archipelago, this project presents the stories of twelve Greeks who moved to Lesvos, gathered through in-depth semi-structured interviews and a visual method of mapping their home(s). The results highlight the intricate connections between mobility, belonging, and islandness. The analysis identifies the main factors constituting islandness, including (i) the proximity of the sea and its impact on identity formation, (ii) the unique sense of freedom offered by the island, and (iii) a distinction between being an insider and an outsider on the island. Furthermore, feelings of belonging and home are shown to be influenced by mobility in unique ways between the participants; the increased mobility resulted in a diminished feeling of belonging for some, while for others, islandness facilitated its development. Undoubtedly, archipelagos constitute unique environments for studying the impact of mobility on belonging.

While in the literature on informal greening practices in urban areas, these have often been discussed as political acts of guerilla gardening and commoning, representing a rebellion against neoliberal urban governance regimes and growth-oriented economies, in the cases from the Czech and Estonian context presented in this paper, the main protagonists experience these actions as mundane, everyday practices, or emotional acts of building connections with human and non-human beings in the city. Engaging in practices of care, production, gardening and provisioning, their modes of organisation rather follow an individualistic than a cooperative logic and at times they seek to avoid cooperation with other practitioners and institutional actors. Even though often not intended as transformative interventions and eluding the collaborative logics of commoning, the paper analyses the political consequences and transformative potential these informal greening practices might nevertheless entail, and discusses the wider implications for research and practice: What lessons can be drawn from these mundane practices for the green transition? 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? We intend this paper to contribute to the debates on mundane informal practices that have hitherto received less attention but could give important insights in the light of socio-ecological transformations in the City.

Economic growth serves as a key organizing principle for urban systems, influencing processes from fiscal politics to spatial planning. However, recent findings suggest that continued reliance on growth-based development in already overconsuming geographies is likely to hinder the achievement of internationally agreed sustainability and justice targets, challenging planners to devise pathways beyond growth. Adopting an urban planning perspective, this paper explores the potential of centering 'the common good' in urban development as a foundation for post-growth municipalism. It focuses on the “Kleineschholz” district development project in Freiburg, Germany, which is being developed exclusively with actors oriented toward the common good. The involvement of community-led housing groups as key drivers in the project presents opportunities that extend beyond affordable and sustainable building to include the creation of community-led economies. Through an in-depth case study, the paper examines how the planning approach in Kleineschholz can shift local economies away from market- and growth-based principles towards sharing, inclusion, and sufficiency. At the same time, the creation of new building stock raises critical questions about its overall sustainability impacts and the generalizability of these developments. Ultimately, the findings highlight the highly context-specific nature of Kleineschholz while distilling general lessons for post-growth-oriented urban planning.

Growth-based urban development produces inequality, contributes to climate change and fails to deliver improvements in urban liveability for many urban residents. Yet, even progressive urban administrations are struggling to break away from growth dependency and to implement new models of socio-ecologically just urban development that is not based on growth. While a range of emancipatory policies and initiatives have been experimented with in recent years by progressive municipal administrations, many of them face contradictions due to continuously having to pursue growth to subsidize key public services and infrastructures, as well as to satisfy a hegemonic coalition of pro-growth elites.

It is therefore of high importance to first, better understand the growth dependencies faced by urban administrations. Second, we deem it essential to investigate the potential of municipalist postgrowth-oriented policies to contribute to breaking away from growth dependency, and to foster alternative models of urban development. These include policies around social reproduction, commoning, public provisioning, collectivizing infrastructure, housing, sufficiency, and others.

The proposed contribution introduces a framework for understanding and analysing urban growth dependencies. Moreover, I present a review of policies, interventions, and initiatives that have been implemented in municipalist cities and beyond, and how they have challenged urban growth dependencies. Finally, I present insights from a novel participatory methodology we are developing. The latter involves activists, public officials, policy makers and experts in a multi-step process aiming to understand the mechanisms trapping a specific city in growth dependency, and to identify leverage points and pathways to move beyond them. We are currently testing a pilot of this participatory methodology in the city of Girona, Catalonia. Girona is governed by a center-left coalition which has openly expressed interest in experimenting with postgrowth urban policy, and established an official collaboration agreement with several academic and other actors to explore possibilities with this regard.

From here, I want to spark discussions on our aim to create a practical toolkit for progressive municipalist administrations to effectively break with growth dependencies, work towards new, non growth-based models of urban developments and to create lasting conditions for a postgrowth spatial politics across different geographical scales.

This research is funded by the ERC, through the project REAL – A Postgrowth Deal.

The Battle of Mohács in 1526 is an outstanding important event in the history of Hungary and Central Europe. Suleiman the Magnificent defeated the Hungarian and allied armies near the small Hungarian town, Mohács. The result was the decline of the middle power of medieval Europe, the Kingdom of Hungary. Later (even today) it seemed that this was the end of the golden age for Hungary. The memory of the battle has played an important role in political debates for centuries. The research described in this presentation will show how far historical reality and memory have drifted apart. A landscape of memory has emerged here, where the descendants of the former participants - Hungarians, Turks, Poles etc - have created their own memorials. Aligning scientific fact and memory is a major challenge in managing the heritage of Mohács. The 500th anniversary is approaching: the need to create a new, modern image of Mohács and to reflect on the biases of the politics of memory is becoming increasingly urgent.

The Battle of Varna was fought on 10 November 1444. In the battle, the Ottoman forces, led by Murad II. defeated the Christian forces of central and south-eastern Europe, which included Hungarians, Poles, Czechs, Germans, Croats and Romanians, along with Bulgarian troops. The European troops were led by Władysław III Warneńczyk, King of Hungary and Poland, and John Hunyadi. The battle was disastrous. Although both sides suffered heavy losses, European losses were greater and the king fell. The main consequence was that the Balkans were opened up to further Ottoman conquest and the capture of Constantinople (1453). From Bulgaria to Poland, the memory of the battle has been preserved and has become a point of reflection for unity in Central Europe. The study examines the battlefield's geo-cultural content, how posterity has used the battlefield and the memory of the battle for political purposes.

Hungarians and Croats fought several battles against the expanding Ottoman Empire. As the Battle of Mohács in 1526 has a central role in the Hungarian memory, the Battle of Krbava Field on 9 September 1493 plays a similar role in Croatian national memory. The memory of the battle was imprinted on the mind of contemporaries, appeared in the 16th and 17th century Christian sources, as well as in the 19th and 20th century Hungarian and Croatian historiography. However, while the memory of the Battle of Mohács is uninterrupted in the Hungarian public consciousness, the memory of the Battle of Krbava Field was partially relegated to the background in Yugoslavia’s interwar period and completely forgotten during the Yugoslav socialist regime, only to be revived after Croatia regained its independence. Our presentation will survey Christian and Ottoman sources from the 15th and 17th centuries that describe the battle. We will present the memory of the battle in Croatian folk literature, its place in Croatian historical science and in the 19th–21st century memory culture, including how the contemporary Croatian state and Church have implemented their concept of memory on and around the battlefield. Finally, we will reflect on whether the Battle of Krbava Field can be called the Croatian Mohács or Croatian Kosovo, as it is so often done.

In this study, I have attempted to shed light on the toponymy of the Hungarian and Croatian parts of the Baranya region from the point of view of memory politics and geography, using the example of the Ottoman–Habsburg wars (1683–1689). One of the most important battles took place here, near the Harsány Hill (1687) where the united Habsburg forces led by Charles V, Duke of Lorraine (1643–1690) won a brilliant victory over the Ottoman troops led by Sarı Süleyman Pasha (1627–1687).

A larger group of toponyms and hydronyms commemorating the wars of reconquest are often associated with the cult of Virgin Mary (Mariahilf). This cult formed the ideological basis of the Habsburg party fighting against the Ottomans’ Islamic faith. Apart from this, several names of places reflect the memories of the wars. Many of them refer to natural objects such as hills, valleys, rivers and swamps, while others allude to certain types of buildings and street names. Due to turbulent political changes of the last three hundred years many of these toponyms do not exist anymore.

The collected data from different memorial sites were classified and then mapped using QGIS software.

The memory of the Ottoman–Habsburg wars of the late 17th century was affected by numerous political influences. The critical geopolitical analysis can help us understand the dynamics of the local cultural and political life.

In 2023, Greenland signed a Memorandum of Understanding on raw materials value chain with the European Union. This non-binding partnership sets the basis for cooperation on mineral resources from extraction to end product. Greenland would benefit from European scientific and industrial network and investments, while Europe would secure a critical raw materials supply chain. Cooperation is ideologically framed by European green transition politics, and by Greenlandic objective to finance independence from Denmark by mining rent. These agendas create the picture of a homogenous State led, green and Europe oriented mining industry; a picture self-fulfilling through mining projects. Nevertheless, ethnographic data and document analysis (from industry, government, European structures) collected since 2016 reveal the central place of another actors, junior companies. Junior companies are young corporations conducting preliminary fieldworks and gathering investments, with the aim of making money by becoming listed on the stock exchange or be bought by a mining giant. To achieve this goal, they work by the “engineering of promises”: their discourses on resource-richness and operations of social development create the illusion of a clear mining future (Laurent and Merlin 2021). It sets the promise of industrial development, whereas it is mere speculation. Most of the time, no mine open. In this contribution, I will investigate the role of junior companies in the EU-Greenland mining partnership and the effect of the engineering of promises on the State led, green and Europe oriented mining narrative and the possibility of its fulfilment. On which promises do junior companies operate in Greenland and Europe? In which ways does it lead to the contradictory effects of seeing Greenland as a central place from Europe, and feeling left-behind from Greenlandic mining places? How is this mining future changing Greenland’s place in Europe? To respond, I will historically contextualise EU-Greenland mining relationships and carry out a mining project case study relying on ethnographic data and document analysis.

Laurent B., Merlin J. « L’ingénierie de la promesse : le renouveau minier français et la « mine responsable » » Nature, Science Society, 2021, 29 : 55-68

This paper critically examines the limitations of Planetary Urbanization (PU) theories by exploring copper mining in Krivelj, Serbia, through the lens of Cindi Katz’s concept of countertopography. As Brenner and Schmid articulated, primarily in Planetary Urbanization: Towards a New Epistemology of the Urban, in 2015, Planetary Urbanization conceptualizes urbanization as a planetary-scale process integrating extraction zones into global infrastructure and production systems. While the theory comprehensively critiques capitalism’s spatial logic, it risks erasing localized urban processes' specificities, contradictions, and lived realities. The case study of Krivelj, a village deeply affected by copper extraction and environmental degradation, reveals the shortcomings of PU’s abstraction and emphasizes the necessity of grounded, place-based analyses.

The paper employs critical mapping practices to trace the collective landscapes of extraction in Krivelj, demonstrating how global urbanization processes generate profound local environmental, social, and cultural disruptions. These mappings—produced using GIS data, LIDAR, field recordings, and community mapping, reveal the ecological consequences of mining, such as river rerouting, soil contamination, and toxic waste dispersal. Simultaneously, the study maps social fragmentation caused by Zijin Mining Group’s piecemeal relocation strategies, which undermine community cohesion and cultural continuity. Residents’ lived experiences and oral histories highlight the economic dependencies and labor precarities that sustain global copper flows while marginalizing local actors.

Drawing on Katz’s theory of countertopography, the research reframes Krivelj as a material and conceptual “outside” to Planetary Urbanization—spaces where the smooth integration of global systems is disrupted, contested, and rendered incomplete. By linking local struggles to broader critiques of capitalist urbanization, countertopography resists the analytical flattening inherent in PU, emphasizing the relational yet situated nature of urbanization processes. Mapping becomes an analytical tool to render visible spatial and social injustices often erased by dominant urban theories.

This paper argues that extraction sites like Krivelj are not peripheral nodes within planetary urban networks but central spaces for understanding urbanization’s contradictions and limits. By centering the specific environmental, social, and cultural impacts of copper mining, the study challenges the totalizing abstraction of PU. It advocates for urban theories that account for localized agency, resistance, and alternative futures. Through critical cartographic methods, the research marginalized spaces as essential sites for rethinking urbanization in the age of global capitalism.

At both European and national levels, policies designed to reduce dependence on critical materials, and to extract minerals from Europe’s subsoil are taking shape since the early 2010s. These policies give rise to new mining projects in Europe. In particular, lithium is of interest to many industrial and political actors, due to its role in energy transition strategies. These extractive projects are made possible by a diversity of financial flows. European lithium projects are thus supported by private fund-raising and investment, bank loans, subsidies and public financial instruments, etc. These flows are carried out by different types of actors, who act at various scales, and support a variety of territorial projects. Based on this observation, we propose to question new mining futures by identifying and analyzing the financial flows that make lithium valorization projects possible. Who provides the capital? What narratives justify the financing of these mining projects? What territorial projects do they support?

This proposal links two fields : the political geography of resources, which studies resources making processes (Raffestin, 1980 ; Bridge, 2009); and approaches based on territorial metabolism that integrate power relations (Buclet, Donsimoni, 2020 ; Buclet, 2022). The aim is to analyze the financial flows which form the territorial metabolism of lithium, to understand how they structure networks of actors, discourses and territorial projects. Thus, this proposal takes a close look at critical resource geography’s invitation to consider the “resource-making/world-making” approach (Valdivia et al., 2022), which links construction of resources processes with production of socioecological worlds.

To do so, we focus on the lithium exploration and exploitation projects located in Alsace, France. This region has a deep history of subsoil exploitation, particularly around oil and potash, now closed. Today, new socio-industrial systems are structuring around lithium, capturing financial flows of various kinds. We analyze the role of European and national funding on the discursive framing about Alsacian lithium. According to the funding sources and the geographical scale at which a given actor is positioned, lithium discursive frames can vary from environmental protection, to national strategic autonomy, or even local economic development.

The article discusses the securitization of lithium mining in France, particularly focusing on the Imerys' EMILI project. Imerys plans to extract and refine 34,000 tons of lithium hydroxide annually over 25 years, starting in 2027. This is seen as a crucial development given the European Union's critical raw materials law of 2024, which aims to reduce dependency on foreign lithium crucial for electric vehicle batteries and enhance national security.

The article uses the public debate on the EMILI project, led by the French National Commission for Public Debate from March to July 2024, as a case study to explore how lithium supply security is framed within national and European contexts. The discourse during the debate emphasized securing a local lithium supply as part of a broader strategic move to bolster economic and energy sovereignty, and to align with ecological and industrial benefits.

The concept of "securitization," originally a critical security studies term, is applied to understand the framing of lithium mining as a security issue. Securitization involves presenting an issue as an existential threat that requires extraordinary measures to manage. In this case, the perceived dependence on foreign lithium supplies is presented as a threat to national and European industrial autonomy and energy security.

The article critically examines the political and rhetorical strategies used during the debate to justify the project, noting the alignment of state actors with mining interests, which frame lithium mining as beneficial for ecological sustainability, industrial strategy, and national sovereignty. This alignment is supported by references to academic theories and prior political discourse on mining in France, suggesting that securitization serves as a useful analytical framework to explore the dynamics at play.

Ultimately, the article argues that understanding the securitization of lithium through such projects offers insights into the geo-economic and political dynamics influencing resource management strategies in France and Europe, within the context of increasing global competition for critical materials like lithium.

After WWII, large housing estates (LHEs) began to flourish on the urban fringes on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Their spatial organization, physiognomy, and form arose from the progressive ideas promoted by CIAM and especially Le Corbusier. When built, LHEs were praised for quickly and cost-effectively dealing with the housing crisis while offering relatively good dwelling conditions. In the Eastern Bloc, they have evolved into the most dominant type of urban housing, making up the lion's share of the total housing stock in the region. While sharing numerous similarities with their counterparts in Western European countries, primarily in the physical sense, these estates were at the same time characterized by certain specificities that were shaped by a combination of political, economic, and ideological factors related to socialism – just as socialist and capitalist cities differed, so did their LHEs. This paper aims to compare and contrast them. It discusses the main features and specificities of LHEs in Central and Eastern Europe based on relevant literature sources, particularly in relation to the development trajectory and characteristics of those located on the other side of the Iron Curtain, thus contributing to the body of knowledge on the urban heritage of socialism.

The15minEstates project was launched in January 2024 as part of the Driving Urban Transitions programme. The 15minESTATES project looks at the nexus of (1) urban space, (2) transport options, and (3) people’s needs and capacities as key dimensions for sustainable mobility transitions in five large European cities (i.e. Budapest, Delft, Halle, Riga, and Sofia). The project aims to co-create locally adapted and accepted spatial strategies and interventions for just and sustainable mobility, with a special emphasis on large-scale housing estates (LHEs). The sample area in Budapest is the large housing estate of Pesterzsébet Centre in Budapest’s 20th district, built between 1963 and 1983, located further away from the city centre, and is characterised by a declining and ageing population. The experts conducted empirical research (questionnaire survey, in-depth interviews with residents) to explore local mobility conditions in the residential area of 17,000 inhabitants. In this presentation, the authors describe the relationship between the built environment of the housing estate and the mobility issues of the local society and use these to outline the characteristics, achievements, and challenges of the 15-minute city concept in Pesterzsébet. At the end of the presentation, recommendations will be formulated to move the neighbourhood towards an area with a more sustainable environment and mobility.

For some years now, East-Germany's large-scale settlements from the 1970/80s have been experiencing a changed dynamic in terms of the social discourse about them, but also in their actual composition of residents. At the same time, the planning instruments for dealing with large housing estates have consolidated the way in which they are developed (Grunze 2017, Krüger 2019, Pasternack 2019, Altrock/Grunze/Kabisch 2018). The day-to-day urban development policy or the basic logic of community work on a large housing estate in 2024 may differ only to a limited extent from that of 2012 or 2018 (following the acceptance after 2000, that urban renewal processes must be social - Germany' Soziale Stadt/Social City). One consequence has been, that urban development and community work are interwoven. Intervention in East Germany, especially in the 2002-2017 funding scheme Stadtumbau Ost combined the deterioration of blocks in one part with an augrading of another part of a settlement. However, the view of large housing estates has changed massively in the last 10-15 years, mainly, but not only, due to the new residents who have been increasingly migrating to Germany (and not just since 2015). The dynamic is particularly striking in large housing estates in eastern Germany, which are changing “from a focus of urban redevelopment to an immigration quarter” (StadtumMig-Project, see e.g.: Bernt et al. 2022), but affects all parts of the country (Helbig/Jähnen 2019; Hunger et al. 2015).
Basically, this dynamic can also be understood as the normalization of a “special type” with a view to 20th century neighbourhoods in the urban periphery, because the heterogenization of a type of neighbourhood that tended to be demographically homogeneous until the end of the modern housing era (1989: reunification, abolition of municipal housing, construction of the last late-modern large housing estates in the GDR) also includes a greater diversity in the composition of the population.
However, the following focus is also possible - focusing on classism rather than ethnicity - according to which, on the contrary, it is more a matter of homogenization: because only the poorer people find space in the only remaining low-cost housing market reserve; i.e. no longer professors living next to shipyard workers (as described in Mau's Lütten Klein), but “Bio-German” poor people living next to immigrant poor people? Or is this what is meant by the normalization of a formerly public welfare-oriented housing estate under capitalism - the “poor” "always" relocate to the “margins”?
The idea is an impulse from a spectator's view: being the honorary chair of the national working group "Urban Regeneration and Prevention-Oriented Development" (1) of the German professional association of planners, SRL (Vereinigung für Stadt-, Regional- und Landesplanung) - and a researcher with a dissertation's expertise in this field (Krüger 2019). The following aspects shall be put into considerations
- The large-scale housing settlements become arrival cities? Do they suit the necessities for that role? Can an established Soziale-Stadt-Governance from after 2000 be transformed to cope that challenge? What change of governance may be needed?
- Due to planning interventions from the 1990s and 2000s the settlements are able to play a model role in terms of coping with an elderly population; many of the settlements received a scalable energetic upgrade; surely relevant for times of energy transformation? How these planning concepts from "repairing" large-scale estates after 1994 can be renewed in our times?
- The estates are a cultural heritage, the last sub-epoch of modern 20th-century housing in Germany. Along with metropolitan needs to erect mass housing along their fringes again - how do the sum of experiences of erection, renovation and regeneration between the 1970s and 2010s can be used for a new era of large-scale estates at the fringes of Germany's metropolises (and how can the existent neighbourhoods may profit from it)?

References:

Bernt, M., El-Kayed, N., Hamann, U., & Keskinkilic, L. (2022). Internal Migration Industries: Shaping the Housing Options for Refugees at the Local Level. Urban Studies, 59(11), 2217–2233.
Altrock, Uwe; Grunze, Nico; Kabisch, Sigrun (Hg.) (2018): Großwohnsiedlungen im Haltbarkeitscheck. Differenzierte Perspektiven ostdeutscher Großwohnsiedlungen. Wiesbaden: Springer.
Grunze, Nico (2017): Ostdeutsche Großwohnsiedlungen. Entwicklung und Perspektiven. Wiesbaden: Springer.
Helbig, Marcel; Jähnen, Stefanie (2019): Pfadabhängigkeiten in den ostdeutschen Städten. In: Peer Pasternack (Hg.): Das andere Bauhaus-Erbe. Leben in den Plattenbausiedlungen heute. Berlin: Berliner Wissenschafts-Verlag, S. 49–68.
Hunger, Bernd; Protz, Ralf; Weidemüller, Dagmar (Hg.) (2015): Perspektiven großer Wohnsiedlungen. Berlin: Kompetenzzentrum Großsiedlungen.
Krüger, Arvid (2019): Neue Steuerungsmodelle der Stadterneuerung - und daraus folgende Anforderungen an die Städtebauförderung, die Kommunen und die gemeinnützige Wohnungswirtschaft. Weimar: Bauhaus-Universität Weimar.
Mau, Steffen (2019): Lütten Klein. Leben in der ostdeutschen Transformationsgesellschaft. Berlin: Suhrkamp.
Peer Pasternack (Hg.) (2019): Das andere Bauhaus-Erbe. Leben in den Plattenbausiedlungen heute. Berlin: Berliner Wissenschafts-Verlag.
(1) https://srl.de/ueber-uns/organisation/arbeitskreise/ak-stadterneuerung-und-pr%C3%A4ventive-stadtentwicklung/ansprechpartner.html [especially with regard to session 51 in Schwerin, November 2024]

Tirana, the Albanian capital, started its urban transition processes after the fall of communism in a rather small-scale and mostly informal manner. Three decades later, urban development in the metropolis with its tripled population has generally formalised. The built fabric experienced a metamorphosis into a globalised urban structure. During the last years, a certain number of megaprojects (in Albanian terms) arose in the city, such as mixed-use skyscrapers, high-rise apartment buildings and big shopping malls or other commercial buildings. In this context, the contribution will address topics of urban geographic interest. One is the overwhelming scalar dimension of the projects as well as the randomness of function and design. Tirana’s skyline shows more and more elements of globalised structures, but from an organisational point of view there is no corresponding functional internationalisation. Another is the fact that some of the large urban developments are organised as public-private partnerships. In such cases, the public sector provides the property, applies for approval and then transfers the responsibility to private developers. This model fosters urban development and renewal, but at the same time, the profits will be privatised. All in all, we note in Tirana an urbanism of exception that can only be partially explained with common theoretical approaches but rather requires an appropriate consideration of the evolutionary background, thus a relational perspective. We take up the concept of the “ordinary city” and discuss the scope of socialism and post-socialism as explanatory concepts.

The Prut River is an important hydrological artery for Romania and the Republic of Moldova. Until the 1970s, the hydrotechnical arrangements were not generalized at the level of the entire riverbed, but after the floods starting in 1979, many hydrotechnical works were designed and executed, including in the hydrographic basins of the tributaries, which culminated in the construction of the Stanca-Costești Lake, for the regularization of the flow of the Prut River. While these regularizations had the expected effect, and the effects of some historical floods in 2008 and 2010 were greatly diminished, the controlled overflows during the floods and the rupture of some dams created damage. From the point of view of risk, vulnerability and risk, these structural measures have an obvious positive effect, but there is an unusual variability in the social and political context of Romania and the Republic of Moldova. In order to study this variability, we inventoried the hydrotechnical facilities with the role of protection against floods at the level of the major and minor riverbeds of the Prut River, but also the effects induced by historical floods. The analysis confirms the existence of differences in planning, which have effects in terms of vulnerability and risk. In the absence of modelling that considers data on both sides of the river basin and the riverbed, the identification of undeveloped areas is an approach that can help reduce vulnerabilities through information measures.

Location theory addresses problems of locating points in two-dimensional space, i.e., facilities whose dimensions are negligible compared to the dimensions of the space in which locations are selected (e.g., city or regional territory). As such, it directly or indirectly underpins several doctrines of regional economics, development, and planning and is fundamentally oriented toward formulating location problems and creating models to solve them.

As the optimal spatial distribution of various facilities and the organization of their functionality are becoming increasingly significant issues in planning, theorists and practitioners have developed numerous location models. However, this topic largely remains within the realm of scientific research, often excluded from the processes of creating and implementing spatial plans, which are public documents essential for defining and planning the spatial organization of service systems within specific territorial units.

As a subgroup of location models, location-allocation models are characterized by the aim to optimally locate one or (most commonly) several facilities under clearly defined objectives and constraints, while their allocation component assigns appropriate users to these facilities. Given that maximizing accessibility (minimizing total and thus average spatial or temporal distances between users and facilities) is a fundamental criterion, the p-median location-allocation model was applied to plan the development of the existing network of primary healthcare facilities in the territory of the City of Zaječar. Population projections by settlement, derived using an extrapolation method particularly suited for smaller territorial units and relatively short periods, were directly integrated into the modelling process. This method requires minimal data, typically relying on population data available from national censuses.

An analysis of three main scenarios was conducted, in line with the planning horizon of the existing spatial plan for the City of Zaječar: the baseline scenario (maintaining current capacities), the positive scenario (opening a certain number of new facilities), and the negative scenario (closing a certain number of existing facilities). The results provided spatially determined solutions optimized for maximizing accessibility to these facilities. Comparisons with spatial organizations involving randomly selected locations for opening or closing facilities demonstrated clear optimisation benefits, including time and cost savings and reduced negative environmental impacts of transportation.

In the Netherlands in 1941, under German occupation, a new centralized legal regime was instituted that mandated spatial planning on the local, regional, and national level. In the ensuing years, this legal foundation evolved in such a way that “survey before plan” became a core ingredient of spatial planning. The resulting demand for socio-spatial research across government layers was largely captured by young, new university graduates (primarily of human geography and sociology). They obtained employment in governmental and para-governmental spatial planning institutions in the post-war Netherlands. This generation institutionalized the new field of planology as the Dutch translation of spatial planning, eventually culminating in the first planology university chair in 1962. Drawing on theoretical ideas on institutional entrepreneurship and the sociology of the professions, this paper explores how and why academia and policy co-produced planology as a professional field in the Netherlands between 1945 and 1962. The paper builds on extensive historical research in archives of Dutch universities, governmental institutions and professional organisations. Practically, it thereby shows how socio-spatial research became a centrepiece of the globally heralded Dutch spatial planning tradition. On a more abstract level, the paper offers an exemplary case of the professionalization of a research tradition and the development of multi-scalar knowledge networks and interactions between academia and policy.

Reaffirming the role of geography in the field of the organisation of institutional structures is a necessary operation to return to the creation of alternative political and geographical imaginaries (Dematteis, 2021).

This seems to suggest that geographers should support criticism with an activity of synthesis and proposal that combines territorial and institutional reflection at all scales. In a certain way, it is necessary to respond to the call for civil and political responsibility urged by Massey (2004; 2008). Numerous contributions have highlighted the need to reaffirm the role of geographic discipline in the exploration and definition, especially in the context of the European continent, of grand regional narratives and visionary geographies (Loriaux 2008; Murphy 2013; McConnell et al. 2017; van Meeteren 2020; Bachmann 2022).

Building on the recent reflections of Wills (2019), Jeffrey and Dyson (2021), and Bachmann (2022), and in light of the recent developments of Italian federalist thought (Montani 2022; Majocchi 2023; Saputo 2023), which moves from the European dimension toward the global one, without neglecting local levels, this contribution aims to address the issue of relations between society, territory, and institutions through the political-institutional vision and action of federalists. However, the intention is not to develop a critical analysis of the geographical reflections conducted on the European Union and its various components and dimensions, but rather to identify and highlight the potential links between the two areas of research.

It is in this perspective that we believe we can advance the hypothesis that the ‘geographical sensibility’ of federalism in its militant form is not limited to overcoming the primacy of the nation-state but concerns the question of overcoming the processes of centralisation of states in favour of communities and territories. The aim of this paper is therefore to contribute to the understanding of how this form of federalism rests on a profound, but little investigated, ‘geographical sensibility’.

The concept of “waiting territories” (Gomes & Musset, 2016) help to understand how migratory projects, regarding the initial phase of movement, can have moments of deceleration, from a chronotopic point of view. “Waiting” to arrive at final destination, implies processes of deterritorialization and reterritorialization, with complexification of previous aspirations (Haesbaert, 2003; Fernandes, 2008).
Literary Geography, using the methodology of content analysis, can contribute to understand certain migratory phenomena, such as return migrations, which occurred in the process of African decolonization, between Angola, Mozambique and Portugal. The geographic reading of the book "O Retorno [The Return]”, by Dulce Maria Cardoso, make possible to answer the key-question: how forced displacement of Portuguese people, living in African colonies, was conditioned by “waiting territories”.
Using the methodology of content analysis, it will be possible to discuss the reality fictionalized by the author, who experienced this process in her adolescence, in the mid-70s of the 20th century, that is, from the escape (deterritorialization) to the arrival in the territory waiting in Portuguese metropolis, where it was needed to reconfigure the temporary living space (reterritorialization).
This reflection can be useful to understand the dynamics of contemporary migratory movements in a changing Europe, with an increasingly diverse migratory matrix, reflected in the intercultural dimension.

Gianni Rodari was a lover of geography. He would study for weeks maps and plans of the places where he planned to set his stories. It is well known, for example, that he spent time on his beloved Lake Orta before writing his last and famous novel “C’era due volte il Barone Lamberto” to study its waterways, bell towers and paths. For each village marked on the map, a rhyme or a childhood memory sprang up, which are now brought back to the Rodari Museum (Omegna, his birthplace) for the benefit of all visitors, in an amazing digital journey around Cusio.

Rodari’s passion for geography can also be seen in the title of the column he chose when he was working for the newspaper "Paese Sera": "Benelux". Three people wrote there and it seemed good to him to give the reference to the geographical triad formed by the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg. Incidentally, a sign of destiny, even that ‘Country’ in the name of the newspaper he contributed to suggested that the subject was written in his DNA!

Indeed, the combination of geographical science and Rodari’s imagination is no mere coincidence; in his texts, especially those for children and young people, one finds many ‘georeferenced’ references: places, territories, landscapes, cities, etc.

He himself has travelled a lot along the Peninsula, on foot, by plane or by train, but for most of his journeys he has used a very special means of transport: his imagination. What story lies behind the city of Como to which, who knows why, one day an accent was added? What could have happened to the palace of ice cream in the piazza of Bologna? And why on earth does a witty gentleman fly over the heads of bathers on the beach at Ostia?

Rodari’s stories accompany one to the sea or to the mountains. The important thing is that the journey is accessible to all, without exception. Playing between regions and cities, making those faraway places closer and ‘friends’, is a great way to make literature a key to knowledge, to sharing, to inclusion. There is a ‘European modernity’ in all this that is worth investigating and highlighting.

Come to think of it, both Rodari and geography speak of the reality that surrounds us, they start from concrete, visible, tangible data to then elaborate reflections, produce knowledge and, why not, try to change reality by imagining new paths.

Within this framework, the contribution aims to present a "fantastic" tour of Italy, which can be done today in retrospect, following the geographical trail of the Maestro’s rhymes and stories. This metaphorical journey succeeds in illustrating his proposal of "creative geography" that has the power to entertain and teach, to each reader; no age, census or other characteristics matter; his literature, though aimed at childhood, knows how to speak to everyone, without exclusions, just as he liked.

Since the past, travel literature has been considered an interesting source to know and explore new territories. Also travels and pilgrimages have occupied many pages of literary works, while showing changing historical periods and human experiences (Coleman and Elsner, 2003). Travel literature has moved from simply territorial descriptions to subjectivity; indeed, writers convey and share a more intimate “architecture of their journeys” (Brosseau, 1994; Alexander, 2015). It does not only consist of external and recognizable territorial representations, as the real essence is properly the “subjective territorial exploration” made up thanks to senses and emotions that activate new spatial meanings.

Considering these premises, the main aim of the proposal is to explore the intimate “architecture of a European pilgrimage space” by selecting a corpus of travel diaries on the Camino de Santiago. As First European Cultural Route since 1987, and a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1993, its history and landscape record the passing of time in Europe. In addition, contemporary travel literature on the Camino shows how the route is becoming a successful Leitmotiv for the European cultural industry, as it takes part in the spatial and cultural re-turn (Lopez, 2019). The present research analyses a selected corpus of travel diaries describing European landscapes that inspire an intimate “sense of place”. From a methodological point of view, the Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis highlights a subject-centred approach that explores and reproduces the surrounding environment according to two main criteria: senses and emotions. As well as Daniels and Cosgrove (1988: 1) considered landscape as “a cultural image, a pictorial way of representing, structuring or symbolising surroundings”, also literary representations are ways of seeing and symbolizing the surrounding environments. As a result, the singularity of the pilgrimage experience and the subjective meaning-making process of the space of the Camino produce a catalogue of Caminoscapes, by which I mean variable combinations of senses and emotions interacting in pilgrims’ meaning-making processes of/on the Camino, working as settings and attributes of their literary representations.

References
Alexander N. (2015). On Literary Geography. Literary Geographies, I(1): 3-6.
Brosseau M. (1994). Geography’s literature. Progress in Human Geography, 18(3): 333-353.
Coleman S., Elsner J. (2003). Pilgrim Voices. Narrative and Authorship in Christian Pilgrimage. New York: Berghahan Books.
Cosgrove, D.; Daniels, S. (1988). The Iconography of Landscape: Essays on The Symbolic Representation, Design and Use of Past Environments. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lopez L. (2019). A geo-literary analysis through human senses. Towards a Sensuous Camino geography. Emotion, Space and Society, 30: 9-19.

Sinophone literature represents a fertile ground for exploring the dynamics of cultural hybridization resulting from migration. By examining the works of Sinophone authors who have relocated to Europe, it becomes possible to analyse the ways in which literary texts depict the encounter between different cultural worlds. These authors often incorporate autobiographical elements or bilingual texts, creating bridges between their native Chinese culture and the European societies they inhabit. Such texts, whether characterized by stereotypical portrayals or nuanced, in-depth descriptions, offer valuable material for investigating the construction of spatial and cultural imaginaries.
From a geo-literary perspective, the social value of these texts lies in their ability to reveal how migration shapes the perception and representation of Europe in Sinophone literature. Some narratives may emphasize initial impressions of European cities (sometimes influenced by astonishment or preconceptions), while others might evolve into more complex and detailed representations over time. This diversity of approaches underscores the potential of geo-literary analysis to examine how literature contributes to construct cultural identities and spatial understandings.
Ultimately, Sinophone literary production invites reflection on its dual role: it not only documents the experience of migration but also acts as a mediator in the cultural exchange between China and Europe. As such, it offers significant insights into the broader cultural, social, and geographic dynamics that influence both literary production and intercultural relations.

Despite certain restrictions for foreign citizens, international second home demand in the Croatian littoral increased even before Croatia joined the EU (1st July 2013). This was followed by the full opening of the real estate market to EU citizens, which led to an even greater increase in demand for foreign second home ownership in the Croatian littoral. The above-mentioned increase was influenced by the following factors: a) the strong tourism development in Croatia in the first two decades of the 21st century, b) favourable real estate prices compared to the more developed EU countries, c) the country's image as safe for investment, d) commercial and entrepreneurial reasons, due to the rapid increase in real estate prices, e) improvement of traffic accessibility by building motorways and introducing more flights, f) Croatia's accession to the Schengen area (1st January 2023), and g) the introduction of the euro (1st January 2023). The COVID 19 pandemic (2020-2023) also had the effect of increasing international second home demand, as second homes were often perceived as safe havens that enabled both remote working and vacations in an intimate, private setting.

The three main objectives of the research are: a) to determine the spatial distribution of foreign-owned second homes, b) to identify the structure of foreign owners in relation to the country of residence and c) to examine the connection between the number of foreign-owned second homes and the number of rental properties in private accommodation. The study area is the Croatian littoral, the hot spot area of international second home demand, which includes the Croatian coast, islands, and the immediate hinterland which together with the coast form an inseparable functional unit. Statistical analyses were carried out at the level of 141 local self-government units (LAU 2) whose territory extends to the coastline, as well as those whose administrative seat is located less than 10 kilometres by road from the nearest coastal settlement. The research used tourism statistics data from the Croatian Tourist Board's e-Visitor platform for all years since its introduction, i.e. for the period from 2016 to 2024.

In many regions of the world, and undoubtedly among them in Mediterranean countries, the dynamics of tourism are laying bare many tensions of a social, economic, cultural and spatial-territorial nature. Many cities are affected by heavy dynamics in which tourism-related transformations are intertwined according to recurring but contextually determined logics with dynamics of gentrification and replacement of resident populations; at the same time, in both coastal and mountainous areas, the tourism models of the past, rapidly obsolescing, leave behind a legacy of abandonment and underuse of buildings and parts of settlements.

In particular, in many coastal areas of the Mediterranean, and therefore also in our country, different models of tourist use have followed one another over the decades, and have become intertwined with the peculiar economic and social dynamics of each context, such as the more or less accentuated tourist specialisation of the labour market, the temporal forms and models of heritage use (e.g. that of second homes), the new residential and work models of metropolitan populations, and so on.

Starting from this problematic background, the paper questions the peculiar relations that can be read at a spatial level between overtourism and abandonment, which sometimes affect different territories, but which in many cases affect, on the contrary, the same contexts. In particular, the paper critically discusses some cases of abandonment or underuse of buildings, structures and tourist complexes in coastal areas, where in other respects the dynamics of tourist flows lead to congestion, overuse of existing infrastructures and services, and expulsion of the resident population, starting from some contexts of the Ligurian and Tuscan coastline with a long tradition of tourism, which has therefore gone through different phases and patterns.

The research carried out in these contexts shows the difficulties associated with the passive adherence to a development model based on a sector that is undoubtedly important, but with low added value and based on the depletion of environmental and territorial resources, and the importance of initiating a critical, contextual and argued reflection as a basis for imagining different development policies.

The purpose of this paper is to understand how the spatial distribution of domestic tourism in Ireland has changed since the COVID-19 pandemic. It is understood that the tourism sector suffered during the pandemic. However, the behaviour of domestic tourists may have changed due to the restrictions on outbound flights and a general fear of engaging in what was considered a risky activity (ie flying). To better understand the changing geography of domestic tourism this paper analyses the share of domestic tourism that each country had pre-pandemic (2019) and post-pandemic (2022). The paper also utilises a resilience index for the years 2020 to 2022 for counties in Ireland to understand how individual counties absorbed and rebounded from the crisis. The research shows that the impact of the pandemic on domestic tourism was not homogenous across Ireland with some counties being able to better absorb and rebound stronger from the negative impacts of COVID-19.

This paper provides an understanding of the changing preferences of domestic tourism in response to a crisis which is important to understand as the ongoing climate crisis could see an increase in domestic tourism in Ireland. The increasing volatility of summers in Southern Europe (ie increasing heatwaves) may mean that more Irish people decide to holiday at home instead of the traditional foreign holiday to a Southern European destination. Also, prior to COVID-19 there was the emergence of ‘flight shame’ in some parts of Europe where people were travelling by train or bus instead of flying due to the shame felt by flying as it is seen as contributing to climate change. If the ‘flight shame’ phenomenon was to impact Irish tourists, they may choose to holiday within the country instead of flying abroad.

Climate change will inevitably impact the geography of tourism in Europe in the coming decades. Among the most frequently cited threats in the literature are the reduction in snowfall in mountain regions and the loss of beaches due to increased coastal erosion. Several studies suggest that these changes are likely to alter the attractiveness of destinations and lead to shifts in seasonality. While climate change poses a threat to traditional destinations such as the Mediterranean and the Alps, it also presents an opportunity for higher-latitude regions. This has created the illusion that climate change might reduce inequalities in the spatial distribution of tourists by opening up new opportunities for currently marginal tourism regions.

One aspect that has been relatively overlooked in research on the effects of climate change on tourism is the risk posed by the intensification of extreme events. Wildfires are one such hazard that climate change is expected to exacerbate. Southern European countries such as Portugal, Spain, and Greece are among the most wildfire-prone areas globally. At the same time, these countries’ economies are heavily dependent on tourism, with wildfires often coinciding with the peak tourist season.

This paper explores this issue, focusing specifically on the threat in Portugal. In the first part, we analyze the current and future risks of wildfires to tourism in Portugal by combining spatial modeling of environmental conditioning factors with an assessment of the exposure of tourism assets and infrastructure to wildfire hazards. In the second part, we discuss the implications of this risk for tourism policy, particularly regarding inequalities in the distribution of tourism within Portugal. By showing that regions with high structural susceptibility to wildfires and significant vulnerability of tourism assets to this risk often overlap with the country’s demographically and economically marginalized regions, we underscore the risk that wildfires, intensified by climate change, could further hinder efforts to achieve a more balanced and equitable tourism development in Portugal. In short, wildfires, aggravated by climate change, may undermine various policy measures currently being implemented in Portugal to address regional inequalities in tourism.

Most studies of food resilience adopt a ‘macro’ perspective and consider the functioning of the food system at the national or even international scale. At the centre of these studies typically lies the capacity of the food system to withstand or adapt to the effects of external disturbances and its ability to restore the status quo. The key question is the degree of the food system’s resilience, not whether it is or is not resilient. In the context of the Global North, a resilient food system is usually associated with policy interventions aimed at enhancing resilience, these interventions are confined to the market food system and understood as a result of organised groups’ lobbying and campaigning. In this paper, we take a profoundly different approach to studying food system resilience. First, instead of the macroscale perspective, we are concerned with the food system at the micro-level perspective of individual households and their interactions with other households. Second, rather than considering the degree of resilience that arises from political activism and policy actions, we focus on everyday behaviour that is rarely motivated politically. Third, and most importantly, we do not limit our analysis to the commercial food sector but explore how households navigate the complex terrain of market-, alternative market and non-market food sources. The underlying idea is that households combining these three sources of food have a good chance of being more resilient than those that have to rely solely on the mainstream market sector. The results of the twelve focus groups we conducted with different types of households in different geographic contexts do not show the households as seeking to maintain or restore the status quo. Instead, the multiplicity of resources enables them to creatively explore food securing options, considering individual values ​​and local conditions. We combine this qualitative data with the results of a representative survey of Czech households, determining the share of households involved in non-market food production and sharing, and the amount of food produced in these networks. The results show a significant contribution of non-market household food networks to food system resilience.

The shift towards sustainable living necessitates systemic transformations supported by transformative knowledge that integrates diverse forms of expertise, practices, and innovations. Within alternative food systems (AFS), knowledge emerges as a hybrid of expert and lay insights, blending scientific research, traditional practices, and experiential learning. This study focuses on the commodification and institutionalization of sustainability knowledge in Hungary's AFS and its transformative potential for regional development and the ecological paradigm shift.
The interplay between conventional Agricultural Knowledge and Innovation Systems (AKIS) and grassroots alternatives is crucial to understanding these dynamics. Alternative systems thrive on community-based knowledge production, citizen science, and informal networks, while formal AKIS offers structured resources. This research highlights the hybrid spaces where mainstream and alternative food systems interact, creating opportunities for mutual learning, cross-fertilization, and systemic transformation.
However, significant challenges remain, including fragmentation of knowledge networks, limited accessibility, and conflicts between competing food systems. Addressing these barriers requires integrating social innovation, citizen engagement, and digital tools—such as AI—to enhance knowledge exchange and foster resilience. By examining the economics of knowledge in AFS, this study provides critical insights into the hybridization of food systems, offering policymakers and practitioners actionable strategies to bridge divides and strengthen food system resilience.

Achieving sustainable and healthy diets for all is a key goal within the scope of initiatives like the European Green Deal and its Farm-to-Fork strategy. However, socially vulnerable populations face significant barriers in accessing sustainable and nutritious food. This paper explores the enablers and constraints shaping food practices in diverse geographic, cultural, and socio-economic contexts.

Drawing on 50 narrative interviews conducted in Austria, Greece, Portugal, Sweden, and Turkey as part of the ACCTING project (Advancing Behavioural Change through an Inclusive Green Deal), funded by the EU’s Horizon 2020 program, the study employs a gender+ intersectional framework to analyse the individual and structural factors influencing food access, consumption, and waste.

The findings reveal that economic constraints are the most significant barriers to sustainable diets, heavily influencing purchasing decisions and limiting access to healthier options. These constraints, however, often lead to adaptive strategies such as reducing food waste and leveraging community networks or urban gardening for supplemental food production. Structural barriers, including geographic inaccessibility and insufficient infrastructure, further restrict the availability of nutritious and sustainable food.

Cultural values, beliefs, and gendered dynamics also play an important role in shaping household dietary choices. Enablers include strong community support systems, localized food production, and increasing environmental awareness. Urban gardening and solidarity networks are identified as transformative practices, offering both material and emotional support to vulnerable groups.

Regional variations underscore the importance of localized approaches. Younger participants in Greece and Sweden exhibit a greater tendency toward sustainable diets, driven by education and cultural shifts, while narratives from Turkey and Portugal highlight the critical role of community solidarity and local production in mitigating food insecurity.

By disentangling the complex interplay of economic, social, and cultural factors, this study deepens understanding of how to foster sustainable and healthy diets among vulnerable populations.

The Sand Ridge is one tenth of Hungary’s territory, and is located within the Danube-Tisza Interfluve region, a lowland with highly diverse environmental conditions embraced by the two main rivers of the Carpathian Basin. The landscape has been characterized by wetlands and dry sand grasslands. However due to aridification processes (also exacerbated by industrial agricultural practices) this dry-wet duality of the landscape is fading away.The region is well integrated to the globalized capitalist food system. Conventional agribusiness is facing challenges in relation to climate change, as the region was severely affected by drought in 2022 and 2024. To overcome livelihood challenges in an aridifying region a handful of farmers, small and large scale, became interested in (semi-)alternative production practices. Regenerative agriculture promoted by the TMG-REAG Association includes the practices of the use of cover crops, no-till, strip-till or direct sowing, can be applied in both small and large scale and has a potential to improve soil quality and water management. Other alternative production practices (such as organic and permaculture farming) are normally not viable for farmers as they are highly labour intensive. These practices are popular among backyard farmers and often are undertaken by women as unpaid care work. We aim to conduct narrative interviews with both industrial and regenerative agricultural farmers from the Sand Ridge, including those ones, who are engaged in extensive grazing systems as well as backyard farmers focusing on food self-provisioning both with and without an engagement in permaculture/organic farming. Our aim is to better understand how the different stakeholders of the food system(s) engage in different food production practices and how their strategies contribute to their individual and household resilience and how (bio)regional resilience is reflected in their narratives. This research is conducted within the framework of the “Increasing Resilience through Bioregional Planning in the Sand Ridge” project (FK_146599) financed under the NRDI FK_23 funding scheme.

This paper explores international migration inflows in two small islands in the outermost archipelagic regions of the European Union, El Hierro (Canary Islands, Spain) and Pico (Azores, Portugal), focusing on their connection to tourism and the intertwined work and life-cycle transitions of international immigrants. Drawing on data from the ELDEMOR project (www.eldemor.es) and the RE-PLACE project (https://replace-horizon.eu), the study is based on fieldwork involving in-depth interviews with 30 international immigrants and key informants on both islands. The findings argue that tourism provides valuable insights into the life cycle transitions of international immigrants attracted by the unique tourist-economic appeal of remote locations. These immigrants also play a critical role in shaping tourism development in these areas.

The research hypothesis underpinning the article posits that life-cycle transitions—from tourists to permanent immigrants, or from workers to entrepreneurs—highlight the dynamic relationship between migration and tourism. The early stages of tourism on small islands often coincide with the arrival of foreign-born workers and investors, whose personal and professional transitions reflect and shape the evolving tourism models of these destinations. In turn, tourism partly triggers migration, while migration influences specific forms of tourism development.

El Hierro and Pico are significant case studies in sustainable tourism for small, remote islands with fragile ecosystems. Both islands emphasize environmental sustainability and niche tourism over mass tourism, focusing on unique attractions that appeal to specialized market segments. Their approaches support local economies without overwhelming them, integrating tourism with traditional sectors like agriculture. These sustainable models offer valuable lessons for other fragile destinations, balancing economic, environmental, and social priorities.

Moreover, these islands attract immigrants drawn not only by typical lifestyle aspirations, such as seeking a "rural idyll" or "a new life," but also by a desire for "differentiation" and "uniqueness." This distinct motivation underscores how migration and tourism intersect in shaping the socio-economic fabric of remote island communities, offering a framework for understanding and promoting sustainable and resilient tourism development worldwide.

Spending time in second homes has long been a popular activity for tourists, especially in wealthier countries. Still, work and school schedules traditionally limited the use of these properties to weekends and holidays. The Covid-19 pandemic, however, highlighted how the digitalization of work made it possible for a larger portion of the population to work remotely, thereby facilitating the development of multilocal living arrangements. In this new context, second homes have increasingly become central to these spatial arrangements. This paper aims to explore how the use of second homes has evolved during and after the Covid-19 pandemic, focusing on northern Sweden as a case study. The research addresses the challenge of measuring mobility by using geo-coded cellphone data. By combining cellphone location data with second-home ownership patterns, the study assesses how second home usage has shifted and identifies geographic characteristics that correlate with multilocal living. Preliminary findings suggest that not all second home areas are part of multilocal living arrangements, with properties in more desirable locations being used more frequently. The paper concludes by discussing the potential impacts of these changing patterns on destination communities.

Thematic routes connecting natural and cultural attractions offer innovative opportunities for promoting responsible tourism development and addressing the challenges of overtourism in today’s polycrisis environment. By distributing visitor flows more evenly across time and space, these routes not only mitigate the negative effects of concentrated tourism but also encourage the inclusion of less-visited settlements and regions in tourism networks. Such initiatives align with the principles of slow tourism, providing more meaningful travel experiences that emphasize quality over quantity. Linear thematic routes are particularly appealing to modern, experience-driven tourists due to their flexible and customizable nature. Pilgrimage routes offer unique opportunities for physical (walking routes), spiritual (reflective journeys), and intellectual (cultural and historical) enrichment. However, the success and sustainability of such routes depend on stakeholder collaboration requiring continuous communication, shared goal-setting, and coordinated management strategies. The proposed research explores the potential of pilgrimage routes to embody principles of responsible tourism focusing on sites associated with the heritage of Saint Ladislaus I of Hungary (c. 1040-1095) within the Carpathian Basin. The findings contribute to the discourse on sustainable tourism mobility, showcasing how pigrimage routes connecting both popular and emerging sites can serve as tools for local empowerment as well as the reimagination of tourism mobility in a more balanced and responsible manner. In addition to creating an inventory of the region’s Saint Ladislaus-related sites and mapping their possible connection with existing hiking trails, the study is based on interviews with stakeholders (representing religious sites, nature protection, hiking associations and DMOs).

Silence is a millennia-old legacy of the Judeo-Christian cultural community and a pillar of European sustainability. Parallel to when Europe's map of silence began to be redrawn at the dawn of the industrial revolution, the understanding of silence broadened. As urbanisation progressed, the noise, initially characterizing the big cities, gradually encroached into the countryside, and more sources appeared as the erosion of silence. The opposite of silence, noise is now not only an unwanted auditory perception, but also a phenomenon that has a negative impact on the individual’s peacefulness. The tourism mobility, which nowadays become a lifestyle, has contributed significantly to the decline of quiet places; moreover, the development of transport networks and technological progress have made tourists themselves the carrier of noise. In the era of total tourism, travellers not only spread in Europe horizontally and vertically, but also the seasonality of the demand narrowed. As a result, destinations and sites that had been built on and integrated silence as an attraction became noisy places. One of the paradoxes of tourism, which has become increasingly widespread in space and time, is that the tourist, escaping from the noise of everyday life, eliminates that very silence he or she craves. The phenomenon of over-tourism in the 21st century has led to a restriction of tourist flows and consumption of spaces, and to the preservation of silence by different means. The results presented in this presentation have been explored in the research project "Geographical dimensions of understanding the notion of good place within the context of total tourism" (OTKA K134877) and they answer the following questions: (1) How can silence be understood as an attraction in tourism? (2) Which destinations and sites include silence as an integral part of their attractiveness? (3) How much silence plays a role in becoming a good place? (4) What are the threats to quiet places in the age of total tourism? (5) What can management do to preserve silence as Europe's heritage? Silence has been a surprisingly under-studied topic in tourism sustainability and heritage conservation research; for this reason, this presentation aims to narrow this gap by focusing on Europe.

Over the past decade, Croatia has transitioned from being predominantly an emigration country to a country of positive net migration, with significant increases in immigration in 2022 and 2023. The number of immigrants in 2023 nearly doubled compared to 2020 and 2021. This influx of migrant workers, particularly from South and South-East Asia, is helping to alleviate the country’s labour market shortages, gradually replacing migrant workers from neighbouring countries and introducing greater cultural diversity into what was ethnically once a relatively homogeneous society.

Drawing on the basic concepts of R. Penninx’s migrant integration model – specifically the socio-economic dimension of integration, this paper aims to analyse integration challenges of foreign workers coming to Croatia. Their integration experiences are related to socio-culturally relevant indicators of objective dimensions of the quality of life with a special focus on residential integration and actual living conditions linked to the material situation i.e. jobs, housing and income of migrant workers in Croatia (Coates et al, 2013).

The study employs qualitative semi-structured interviews with a range of stakeholders, including representatives of the state and public administration, employers, employment agencies, professional associations, trade unions, and migrant workers themselves, as part of the ongoing project Croatia as an Immigration Country: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives.

Preliminary findings highlight several significant challenges in the employment process, especially for third-country nationals. Key issues include lack of supervision over employers and agencies for employment of foreign workers related to accommodation, antagonisms with domestic workers due to their perception of better working conditions for foreign workers, workplace discrimination, economic issues and constraints of foreign workers etc. Residential conditions for foreign workers vary widely, ranging from organised, paid collective accommodation to individual housing arrangements, with some workers experiencing satisfactory living conditions and others facing more deficient circumstances. These challenges can be largely attributed to Croatia’s underdeveloped migration and integration policies, and are explored in further detail within the paper.

Reference:

Coates, D., Anand, P., & Norris, M. (2013). Housing and Quality of Life for Migrant Communities in Western Europe: A Capabilities Approach. Journal on Migration and Human Security, 1(4), 163-209. https://doi.org/10.1177/233150241300100403

Our research group has been working on Swedish social dynamics for several years and has also conducted surveys among Hungarians living in Sweden. Our results show that a significant proportion of Hungarians in Sweden have a very negative view of the social conditions there. This negative perception is reinforced by the Hungarian government's narrative that Sweden has become a dangerous, disintegrated society. Meanwhile, it should be noted that the available survey data do not confirm these perceptions and opinions, but show that social cohesion in Sweden is high by European comparison. Thus, according to the various dimensions of social capital, Swedish society is not in a bad shape at all, and in fact has a high level of trust, strong social relations and, basically, collective values of cooperation prevail. Compared with Hungary, the “culture of trust” is less favourable, personal interactions are less frequent and less deep, and self-oriented values that threaten the harmonious functioning of society are more strongly present.

Our research aims to explore and understand this seemingly contradictory situation in more depth. One possible explanation is that the widespread legitimisation of the negative image of Sweden portrayed by the domestic government narrative, and the discomfort felt by some Hungarians in Sweden, is linked to the negative characteristics of Hungarian social culture mentioned above. This is because a high level of collective social capital, a "culture of trust", has a wide range of positive individual consequences, and vice versa, while a low level of social capital, a "culture of distrust", inhibits individual fulfilment, increases anxiety and limits coping skills, among other things. We can assume that Hungarians settled in Sweden, coming from a “culture of distrust”, find it much more difficult to cope with new and unfamiliar challenges and have a more negative perception of the social problems that Sweden undoubtedly faces than the Swedes themselves. We can suggest that this difference may be due to the fact that Swedes are more able to rely on their own supportive social culture in times of collective challenges in difficult situations. In this presentation, we will try to find answers to these questions in relation to the closely related issue of well-being.

• The emigration of educated individuals from Iran has become a prominent and multifaceted issue in recent years, eliciting diverse perspectives. Statistical analysis reveals a substantial surge in the number of Iranian students electing Germany as their preferred destination for higher education. Notably, the count of Iranian students studying in Germany has witnessed a more than threefold increase, soaring from 4,182 students in 2008 to 15,200 in 2024. Moreover, the student population has nearly tripled from 4,182 in 2008 to 11,573 in 2021, signifying a 45% surge compared to the preceding year. This prompts an inquiry into the factors underpinning Iranian students' preference for Germany. To delve into this phenomenon, a survey was conducted among Iranians residing in Germany. The survey outcomes reveal that the deteriorating living conditions in Iran, coupled with Germany's political stability and robust social welfare system, have played pivotal roles in motivating students and university graduates to pursue education abroad. Educational advancement emerges as a secondary consideration in their decision-making process.

Driven by globalization, as observed in other European countries, the last decade has witnessed a significant student migration in Latvia. This phenomenon has created an opportunity for Latvian higher education institutions to compete on an international scale by attracting an increasing number of international students especially for young people from Asian countries who want to obtain higher education in the European Union. As a result, the number of international students has more than doubled over the ten-year period, now constituting 14% of the total student population.

In recent years, students as a research object have gained prominence also in the social sciences and geography, as researchers seek to better understand the phenomenon of studentification and the role of students in shaping urban spaces (Murzyn-Kupisz, Szmytkowska 2015; Fabula et at. 2017; Revington 2018). The study of international students has also become a topical issue among geographers (e.g., Apsite-Berina et al., 2023).

In order to encourage international students to contribute to the economy, their successful integration into the local community is essential. This process requires the local community to be receptive and facilitate the integration of international students into the labor market. Existing research in Latvia has concentrated predominantly on societal attitudes towards immigrants as a whole (Kaprāns, Saulītis, Mieriņa 2021). Yet, to date, there has been a dearth of research examining local community attitudes towards students as a distinct social cohort, differentiated from other immigrant groups. Therefore, this study aims to determine local community attitudes towards international students and assess the level of acceptance towards this immigrant group.

To achieve this aim, a survey of the general public on social cohesion will be conducted between the winter of 2024 and the spring of 2025, supported by the State Research Programme of Latvia. The survey will explore whether the public believes that international students contribute positively to the local environment, safety, and economy. Furthermore, the survey will examine public opinion on the desirability of retaining international students in the local economy post-graduation.

There is a growing contradiction between the usual spatial and strategic planning approaches and the existential challenges of our future. Existing planning practices might innovate towards becoming more integrated, overcoming sectoral-silo thinking, taking the functional area as basis instead of planning within administrative boundaries, striving for better multi-level governance cooperation. However, it is very rare that spatial planning considers the limits of growth. The main question of the paper is how traditional planning can be confronted with ideas for resilience, which seem to be needed to avoid the worst climate and environmental consequences of the future. In other words, how traditional planning can be opened up to alternative futures, based on space-specific considerations how economic growth as the main objective can be replaced by focusing on sufficiency, equity and human wellbeing.

In some innovative urban areas already now traces of self-limiting future planning strategies can be found, regarding future trends in the building-housing sector (regeneration instead of new construction), in the spatial planning of new development opportunities (decentralisation, no more land take, TOD), in transport issues (accessibility instead of mobility), in green and blue infrastructure (ecological fairness), in social inequality issues (public services for all), etc. Examples can also be found on innovative elements of planning and implementation of the new ideas, using more inclusive methods of debate (citizen assemblies) and more open governance patterns (functional linkages across metropolitan areas).

Such elements of self-limiting, resiliency oriented future thinking are usually in experimental stage. Even so, they can be used as disruptive ideas to shake traditional spatial planning practices. In a first step planners of an urban area can be confronted with these unusual practices. From their reactions first hypotheses can be raised on the potential ‘resilience flexibility’ of the given urban planning system (which is obviously not the same as the political flexibility of future decisions).

The paper aims to develop the details of such a ‘resilience check’ of metropolitan planning systems. As a concrete application this analysis takes place in six Central European metropolitan areas in the spring of 2025 in the framework of an ongoing Interreg CE project.

This paper draws attention to the importance of temporal infrastructures as barriers to a just, post-growth transformation of societies in the face of planetary crisis. By placing the focus on time and temporalities, the paper argues that the prevailing international political economy perpetuates barriers to exiting planetary crisis towards a more ecologically sustainable societal relationship with nature. The paper outlines a model of the complex and nested temporalities in contemporary political economy and society. It identifies four key path-dependent and nested temporalities crucial for the scholarship of transition infrastructures: (1) geological time, (2) world-history time, (3) Capitalinian time, and (4) digital time.

This paper examines the specific role of digital time. It argues that irrespective of ‘efficiencies’ promised by digital transformation, as long as contemporary digital temporalities exist within the existing political economy of compounding economic growth on a planet with biophysical limits, the character of digital time will always take the form of encouraging and increasing acceleration. Thus, the paper draws on concepts of ‘dynamic stabilisation’ of mature capitalist economies (Rosa et al 2017), its material and environmental impacts (Taffel 2022), along with the social acceleration and acceleration of the pace of life deepened by digital media (Rosa 2013; Wajcman 2022, 2015). It explores how continued social acceleration through digital temporalities can be exemplified in the so-called AI ‘revolution’. This critical approach to digital temporalities reveals how the primary function of AI is to increase efficiency and productivity, offering faster speed/pace of research, learning, and creative outputs, all within an existing ‘business as usual’ political economy centred on maximising growth and productivity, while ignoring the continued material impacts of these infrastructures.

The paper concludes that temporal infrastructures in the digital age require urgent attention. This would enhance understanding of how societies transition away from growth and ‘efficiency models’ that merely ‘fix’ environmental issues in time and space, towards ‘sufficiency’ models where traditionally marginalised activities of care, conviviality and collaboration are favoured as more socially necessary than GDP growth. It concludes by advocating a Global Commons approach to systemic transformation that takes account of uneven geographical harms of planetary crisis.

Cities have gained increasing attention in the debate on how to tackle the global environmental crisis. However, urban strategies for sustainability have often been criticized for being insufficient in effectively mitigating environmental impacts due to externalisation and cost-shifting, and for producing social contradictions, such as ecological gentrification. Rather than considering these critiques as reasons to abandon ecological urban transformations, this article advocates for the right to the ecological city, for which the goals of ecological sustainability and social justice need to be reconciled through a degrowth strategy based on the principles of sufficiency, reuse and sharing. However, this theoretical framework encounters several challenges in urban practice. These challenges are discussed through the author’s lens as an observant participant in the Fondazione di Comunità Porta Palazzo, a community foundation involved in the transformation of the neighbourhoods of Aurora and Porta Palazzo in Turin, Italy, through projects focused on public space and housing, such as the realisation of Italy's first Community Land Trust. The discussion of these challenges suggests that while the right to the ecological city is a hard to achieve, it remains an important goal in the transformation of cities and neighbourhoods, one that must rely on structural change driven by diverse actors across multiple scales.

This paper examines the move from growth to post growth infrastructures. It begins briefly sketching out the ways in which conventional infrastructure is often conceived as engines of growth, driven by logics of growth and configured accordingly. A situation that has conditioned the vast majority of the infrastructural networks through which any transition must be conducted. Some of these infrastructures may be suitable to the task and some suitable for reconfiguration either through alternative use, reuse or shifting governance regimes. Other infrastructures, however, may generate path dependencies and barriers to transition that need to be addressed through regulating, abandoning and allowing the decline of those less suitable to a world without growth. Planning, at the local, city, regional and national scale, emerges as a key practice through which decisions about which infrastructures are suitable, how they may be governed or allowed to decline can be made in dialogue with the publics (human, non-human, and those yet born). Decisions about which, where and when infrastructures are appropriate for the necessary transition away from the consequences of regimes oriented towards growth are often finely balanced and context specific. Thus, planning offers a granular working out of the process of transition often absent when such issues are considered at the abstract level of the economy, ecology or society. Instead, it offers a, albeit messy (in the absence of techno, modernist, neoliberal or populist ‘fixes’ to the problems infrastructures are constituted to solve) mechanism through which both traditional governance bodies, citizens and infrastructural publics can learn to live well among the ruins of growth.

Czechoslovakia no longer exists, but it is interesting to ask whether any elements of Czechoslovak identity persist among the population of the successor states. This presentation focuses on today's Czechia. National identity means here, as in most countries of Central and Eastern Europe, declaring ethnicity, which does not have to be the sane as citizenship. This was the case in the multi-ethnic Habsburg Monarchy before 1918 and in Czechoslovakia until 1992, and it is also the case in the present-day Czechia, even though it has been optional in census since 2001, and more and more people avoid it. In the years 1920-1939, Czechoslovak nationality (not citizenship) was understood as the sum of Czech and Slovak nationality. After the Second World War, the two nationalities were already distinguished. The state was transformed into a federation in 1968, which eventually split into two states in 1992: Czechia and Slovakia. Nevertheless, a very small number of inhabitants continue to state Czechoslovak nationality (in the sense of ethnicity). In the last censuses, there were 6-7 000 people (i.e. less than 1‰). The paper describes their spatial differentiation and tries to explain their motivation.

This paper examines NATO’s influence on shaping regional identities and narratives in the Western Balkans during the first half of the 21st century. The study focuses on the interplay between NATO's interventions, nation-building processes, and the reinterpretation of war memories in six states: Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Kosovo, North Macedonia, and Serbia. In this paper, Croatia is treated as an example country that abandoned the concept of the Western Balkans and achieved all its Euro-Atlantic integration goals.

The central research question explores how NATO’s presence and policies have influenced the construction and adaptation of national identities in a region marked by conflict and post-conflict transitions. The study adopts a multidisciplinary approach, drawing on political geography, historical memory studies, and international relations theories. Methodologically, it combines content analysis of NATO and local government documents, media narratives, and war memorials with qualitative interviews and surveys.

Findings reveal that NATO’s actions have contributed to redefining war memory and identity politics, often aligning them with Euro-Atlantic values. However, these processes vary significantly between NATO member and non-member states in the region, reflecting differing levels of integration and public perception. Case studies illustrate how war memorials and commemorative practices are reinterpreted under changing political regimes, with NATO playing a role in fostering collective memory narratives that emphasize reconciliation and shared security.

This research contributes to understanding the role of military alliances in the adaptation of historical memory to support modern nation-building and geopolitical alignment. It offers insights into the challenges of navigating divergent historical narratives while promoting regional stability and integration.

Monuments of wars and revolutions that defined the 20th century are in a constant state of flux as parts of national identity. They are erected, dismantled, relocated, transformed, depending on the canonical narrative they are ment to promote, thus musealising or even relativising the messages they are supposed to convey. In a capital city, such public works are typically only partly topographically linked to the battlefield, they are much more national symbols of a country. The aim of this study is to examine the history, message and spatial impact of war and revolution monuments of the last century, using Budapest as an example. The main research question is: What kind of social space-shaping effects do the monuments under study reflect in a historical approach? The methodology is based on Lefebvre's (1974/1991) and Soja's (1996) theory of spatial trialectics as a conceptual framework to define spatial layers - the firstspace, the secondspace and the thirdspace - in relation to the past and present monuments and their sites. The sample area consists of the inner districts of Budapest and mainly the core tourist areas. The results can contribute to a better understanding of the relationship between memory politics and urban space in the Hungarian capital.

Ferenc II. Rákóczi (1676-1735) played a major role in the formation of Hungarian identity. As a descendant of noble families, his life was known to the representatives of the Hungarian nation. The War of Independence (1703-1711) led by Rákóczi contributed to the shaping of Hungarian history. Rákóczi and his companions fled abroad after the fighting, first to Poland, then to France and finally to Turkey, where he died in exile. After long political debates, the ashes of Rákóczi and his companions were finally brought to Hungarian territory (Kassa or Kosice) in 1906, in a ceremonial ceremony. However, this area was transferred to the successor states in 1918, as were other places of Rákóczi's memory. Apart from a brief period, they were never returned to the Hungarian state.

Even in the absence of his own memorial sites, Rákóczi's memory has traversed the history of Hungary throughout the 20th century. His character was one of the historical figures who survived the regime changes of the 20th century and survived into the 21st century. This memory has a tangible spatial pattern, as the Hungarian state has tried to address the lack of memorial sites (lieux de mémoire) traditionally associated with Rákóczí.

In my presentation, I would like to show the evolution of the spatiality of Rákóczi memory in the 20th-21st centuries, with a particular focus on the example of Rákóczi memory after the regime changes (1920, 1945, 1990). In the course of this study, I want to examine two major segments. The first is the spread of monuments - especially statues and monuments. The second is the spatiality of social organisations in different political periods.

One of my hypothesis is that during times of major political change, governments sought to turn the sites of Rákóczi memorials to their advantage by placing their organisations there. The direction of this has varied over the historical periods: in the first half of the 20th century, it was directed inland, in the second half of the century it was directed within and beyond the country's borders, and in the 20th and 21st centuries it was mostly directed beyond the borders. To this end, I intend to use heat map analysis to illustrate the location of the commemorative sites, in addition to traditional spatial data visualisation.

This study examines the anti-scientific climate created in the face of a proposed controversial lithium mine project in Serbia, which gained prominence during the EU’s need for increased critical raw materials extraction under the green transition in an attempt to decouple from China. However, scientists from various disciplines in Serbia have raised concerns about the project’s devastating impacts on the environment, biodiversity, and local communities. Since then, they have been silenced, delegitimised, and even threatened and criminalised, breaching the limits of democratic public debate. With this in mind, the paper explores the deepening of knowledge deprivation and eroding public debate for further exacerbating peripheral countries' marginalisation within the European context. The paper is divided into two parts: (i) an economic-geographical introduction related to the above-mentioned project in the context of the economic geography of lithium extraction in the EU and the Balkans. By analysing the economic trends related to mining investments, the study highlights the lithium mine in the Serbian region of Jadar as an example of a new layer to the existing core-and-periphery divisions and unequal power relations in Europe. Part two covers (ii) the anti-scientific climate created under these conditions and its implications for academic freedom and (self-)censorship. This part, therefore, investigates the shrinking space for academic debate due to trends uncovered in the first. In conclusion, by using David Harvey’s concept of a “spatial fix”, the paper identifies the Serbian case as an example of a broader recent trend in the Balkans when it comes to mining for the green transition in general and argues that the current economic-geographic “spatial fixes” which involve lithium mining are leading to shrinking spaces for academia and its peripheralisation, thereby contributing to a new understanding of the concept used by Harvey by expanding its meaning to account for empirical trends.

The collective management of the post-mining era has become a category of public action since the cessation of mining activity in Europe, due to a variety of problems: demolition of obsolete facilities, the proliferation of wasteland and urban vacancy, as well as significant socio-economic difficulties for the local population. The patrimonialization of this mining heritage has been widely promoted as a solution for these territories (Ruhr, Nord-Pas-de-Calais, Lorraine (Mortelette, 2019)). Today, post-mining landscapes are also indicative of public policies of transition, and position them between vulnerability and resilience in territorial projects described by those behind them as demonstrating a shift from unsustainable to sustainable. I'm thinking here of the installation of photovoltaic panels or wind turbines (Buu-Sao, Patinaux, 2023). More recently, the reopening of mines in these areas raises questions about a process that clearly runs counter to the heritage dynamics regularly associated with the mourning of an activity that has come to an end. Are these territories ultimately destined to be “industrial forever”? (Görmar, Kinossian, 2022).To explore these question, I propose to study open-cast mines in Spain and, more particularly, the example of Almaden, a former mining town of Castilla la Mancha. The mercury mine has been in operation for thousands of years. It has been a Unesco cultural landscape since 2012 and a Natura 2000 zone. Its landscape has been undergoing restorative requalification for several decades, against a backdrop of persistent pollution. In May 2024, under the guise of energy transition, the local government authorized a partial reopening of the mines, based on zoning according to geological, economic and environmental criteria, prompting a reaction from the Ecologistas en accion party. Clearly identified as a “left-behind place” due to the demographic configuration of the region, the case of Almadén is examined here in terms of its exemplarity. What discourses legitimize these mining reopening projects, and with what rhetoric? What imaginaries and spatial representations do they conjure up? How are they perceived by the local population and how is the social acceptability of these projects worked out? Based on my thesis work and an initial research project on the installation of photovoltaic panels in Susville, Isère, I'd like to explore the place of landscape in these narratives, and the multiple attachments to it, through fieldwork to be carried out in May 2025.

In response to climate change, many countries are focussing on renewable energies in order to sustainably reduce CO2 emissions. Large quantities of critical raw materials are needed to realise this plan. The increased demand for raw materials is consequently leading to a large number of new mining projects around the world, including in Europe. This development has been strongly criticised by civil society, as these projects directly threaten the environment inhabited by many people. In order to analyse new mining projects in Europe and the associated environmental conflicts, this paper focuses on the lithium mining project in Serbia, which is one of the largest lithium mining projects in Europe. This paper uses a socio-historical approach to examine whether these environmental conflicts are different from the conflicts that led to the climate crisis. Based on the theory of J-B. Fressoz, in which he describes the mechanisms that have led to the environmental crisis of modern times, with the innovative argument that this has not happened because of a lack of environmental awareness, but that it has happened despite people being aware of and frightened by the risks of technical progress for the environment. In order to overcome resistance to the project of modernity, he argued, it was necessary to destroy people's environmental awareness. This phenomenon was theorised by Fressoz under the term ‘de déshinbition modernatrice’.

Based on his approach, this paper analyses the conflict over a proposed lithium mine in Serbia, scrutinizing two opposing perspectives on the environment which confront each other within the conflict. The narratives used by the various actors to legitimise or delegitimise the lithium mine, with a focus on the environmental narrative, serve as research material for this study. Fressoz's theory is used to analyse whether this conflict can be understood as a continuation of the destruction of environmental awareness that has led to today's environmental damage. In this regard, the study will examine the role of environmental standards as a means of accepting environmental damage and reducing civil society resistance to the project.

In southern Italy, many small villages are deeply affected by the demographic crisis and are in danger of disappearing due to population abandonment. For different reasons, this happened in 1980 to the old village of Tocco Caudio (BN). It was built on a structural terrace modelled on the Ignimbrite Campana (39,000 yrs B.P.). This pyroclastic product is considered the result of the largest volcanic explosion in Europe in the last 200,000 years. It covered a large part of the Campania region with significant thickness. This tuffaceous cover, incised by the hydrographic network, has modelled a terrace that, since its very ancient origins (probably 4th century B.C.), has constituted a strategic position and the backdrop for sieges and important battles. These events led to various reconstructions and repopulations. as evidenced by the different architectural superimpositions. These latter are still clearly visible among the ruined buildings. Natural causes, which have hit this village hard, include earthquakes. Historical documents describe the effects of numerous strong tremors since 1125, while for the more recent ones (e.g. 1962 and 1980), the media and residents tell the story in great detail. The stratigraphic and structural layout also favours erosive processes that attack the cliff formed by Ignimbrite and the surrounding areas where sandstones and clays (upper Miocene) outcrop. In the former, collapses are very frequent, also capable of affecting the settlement above, while in the latter, the deepening of the hydrographic network has triggered flows and outflows. These processes also disrupted the access road network. These conditions caused the number of inhabitants to decline rather rapidly, and thus forced them to find a better living situation. What remains of the village has a strong narrative power and could represent one of the geological sites to be protected within the neighbouring regionally protected nature area. Of course, any full reconstructive intervention would change the state of the place, making it lose its descriptive power. This force could be channelled into a ‘city’ path with illustrative panels and reconstructions in a GIS environment, in which the interference between historical events and geological and geomorphological phenomena could be narrated.

Fossil remains are a key tool for studying Earth’s past environments, allowing us to understand climate changes affecting a territory and its consequent evolution. Furthermore, people need to become aware of the uniqueness of fossil remains and how they can become a resource for a territory, being direct evidence of its history. We present multidisciplinary data from a composite section sampled near San Giuliano Lake (Matera, Southern Italy). The study site is situated between the Apulia Foreland and the Bradanic Trough domains of the Southern Apennines. The choice of the study area is motivated by an exceptional discovery, in 2006, of a relatively complete skeleton of a fossil whale, currently housed at the National Ridola Museum of Matera (Basilicata, Italy). This whale, named “Giuliana”, has been classified as the species Balaenoptera cf. musculus, estimated to be about 26 m long, according to Bianucci et al. (2019).

A multi-proxy approach that integrates geology, biostratigraphy, palynology, and paleoecology, allowed us to reconstruct the argille subappennine succession depositional system evolution. The occurrence of the calcareous nannoplankton bioevents and the presence of regionally extinct tree taxa constrain the age of the composite section to the Early Pleistocene (1.256-0.879 Ma) corresponding to the late Calabrian. The documented depositional environment is characterized by repeated events of relatively high organic matter and low oxygen contents of the bottom water masses. This indicates an environment characterized by up-welling currents and strong river input. The hypothesized stratigraphic architecture suggests that the initial phase of the succession underwent tectonic subsidence that exceeded s the sea level change, leading to the formation of a subsiding basin. This phase is followed by a coastline progradation caused by an overlapping action of sea level change and tectonic uplift, interpreted as the Apennine peripheral bulge, during the Calabrian. The upper part of the San Giuliano Lake succession exhibits a progressively increasing paleo depth, representing a slope and a ramp flexuring toward the chain, accompanied by active subsidence phenomena.

References

Bianucci, G., Marx, F.G., Collareta, A., Di Stefano, A., Landini, W., Morigi, C., Varola, A. 2019. Rise of the titans: baleen whales became giants earlier than thought. Biol. Lett. 15, 20190175. http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsbl.2019.0175.

The study presented has been developed within the PRIN 2022 INSITE: Integrated Shared Knowledge: From Geo-Paleontological Heritage to Present Territorial Challenges, funded by the Italian Ministry of University and Research. The project involves two teams of experts from different cultural backgrounds fully integrated in developing activities and pursuing objectives. The two teams consist of territorial experts and palaeontologists, who jointly implement all project activities to reach a development proposal by enhancing cultural assets connected within a territorial network. Conducted with a multidisciplinary approach, the study suggests that geo-heritage can drive sustainable territorial development by defining adequate strategies that can improve the knowledge of territorial resources and their use for sustainable tourism typologies (i.e., slow and cultural tourism). The INSITE project focuses on two pilot sites in the Campania region. The selected case studies are Pietraroja and Le Ciampate del diavolo, chosen because of their peculiarities of being both high-value paleontological resources inside an urban context. These paleontological resources are precious for revitalization if they are mainstreamed into a global design of compatible territorial development. The Fossil Park in Pietraroja “Le Cavere” is notable for the discovery of a small dinosaur fossil, Scypionyx samniticus, commonly called “CIRO”, found in the sediments of a tropical lagoon dating back approximately 110 million years and is renowned for its exceptional fossilization (Dal Sasso and Maganuco, 2011). The site of Ciampate del diavolo is an ichnosite that preserves evidence allowing for behavioural and structural evaluations of Middle Pleistocene hominins. The human footprints found here are likely attributable to Homo heidelbergensis or archaic Homo neanderthalensis and are among the oldest and rarest in the world (Mietto et al., 2022). Both sites rely precariously on a few enthusiasts striving to restore them for public use. In this sense, the INSITE project aims at setting adequate solutions to consider both the need to preserve and improve the fruition of these sites. On one hand, some virtual solutions are proposed, on the other hand, some collaborations among researchers and local communities are being implemented.

This study addresses the issue of using composite indicators as a support decision-making tool in the definition of policies aimed at promoting sustainable development in inner areas. Inner areas chosen as case study refer to two geopaleontological sites that, despite their value as historical evidence, are considered as “external resources” not mainstreamed into their own territorial system. Starting from a systematic scientific literature review mainly aimed at defining the concept of “territorial fruition”, this study proposes to individuate and measuring the propensity of territory in which these resources locate to act as magnets for a global design of territorial revitalization. The use of the term revitalization within this study is no coincidence, it serves to underline the peculiarities of the two territorial settings as inner areas (affected by depopulation; aging population; lack of primary services; difficulty in accessibility, etc.) and thus their need to be studied as parts of a global territorial system to be really revived as a whole. The revitalization process must stem from the consideration of existing and potential interactions between the study areas and the broader territorial context. This includes integrating and connecting cultural assets, eco-environmental features, socio-ethnic singularities, and historical, architectural, and urban values into a joint-cohesive system. According to these premises and with the primary aim of pinpointing those variables that can express the essence of the chosen territorial contexts, this study investigates the aspects adequate to define their sustainable usability mainly referred to:

- identify a threshold value for the territorial attractiveness;

- define territorial accessibility (physical reachability, services accessibility);

- find out types of tourism compatible with the need to both preserve and promote such territorial heritage.

Case studies refer to the territorial contexts: a) “Ciampate del diavolo” in which have been identified some human footprints dating back around 350.000 years ago; b) “Le Cavere” that at present lays on the mountains but approximately 110 million years ago it was a tropical lagoon.

The study assumes the systemic complex approach to territorial analysis, and it aims at defining a scalable method for the evaluation of other geo-sites while recognizing the singularity of cases. It has been developed within the PRIN 2022 INSITE funded by the Italian Ministry of University and Research (MUR).

From the early 1960s, the Netherlands had a growing societal and policy field focusing on development cooperation. Around this time, we can also signal a shift in Dutch geography academia. In the context of (expected) decolonisation, a transformed geographical specialisation emerged. It was named Human Geography of Developing Countries, or in short, development geography. When geographers in the Netherlands started development geography in the late 1960s, they did not yet have a clear synthesis of what distinguished this newfound specialisation as a geographical one theoretically. Jozef Hanrath was the first professor obtaining a chair on the so-called ‘geography of non-Western countries’ in 1965. Strongly emphasising geography’s practical aspects in his inaugural speech, he underlined geographers’ societal relevance in an era of increasing attention to development cooperation. The theoretical ‘how’ of this was yet unclear amongst involved geographers. It seems that Harnath’s inaugural lecture preluded an era of figuring out how to formulate a geographical synthesis. By the end of the 1970s, the four universities in the Netherlands that did development geography shared a geographical perspective on what researching ‘development’ meant. This perspective necessitated a warning against grand theory and plead for a nuanced middle-ground and multi-perspectivity. This raises the question of how the process towards a geographical synthesis unfolded in this decade. What did geographical thinking on ‘development’ come to mean and where did this thinking originate from? What were the changes and continuities in geographical thinking? Who voiced what and for whom? How was academic thinking affected by development practice and policy and vice versa? Using a mobilities of knowledge approach, this paper aims to research the travel and settling of ideas in the science-policy and science-society interfaces of the late 1960s and in the 1970s. It promises insights into how human geographers worked on theory formation, how this related to societal and political landscapes, and what roles theorists from abroad and students played in spreading ideas. Using archival research methods and oral history methods, it takes historical approach on how thinking about ‘development’ in Dutch geography became what it is today.

Given the unpredictable and destructive nature of droughts and floods, especially in farming-dependent countries, the importance of effective risk mitigation strategies cannot be understated. As a part of the transboundary research project “Exploring the paths to cope with hydro-climatic risks in transboundary rural areas along the Prut Valley. A multi-criteria analysis”, this article aims to explore the impacts of opposite hydrological hazard (i.e., droughts and floods) events 1920–1939 in the Prut River Valley (at the border of Romania and the Republic of Moldova), highlighting responses to these water crises. The methodological approach relies on newspaper reports as data sources, as these include details on the mitigation measures implemented by local authorities. The digital archive of newspapers Arcanum (Romania), which include newspapers from the last century, such as “Agriculture of Moldova,” “Basarabia Agriculture” and “Buletinul Agricol” (in the Republic of Moldova), was investigated and the information about hydrological hazards was extracted and aggregated into a database containing more than 200 entries. Each hazard event is documented in terms of date, location, impact, mitigation actions, and data source. A comparison with the available scientific literature was performed in order to validate the database entries. Additionally, GIS tools allowed us to spatialize all the extracted events and the cartographic outputs emphasize spatial clusters of water stress from opposite hydrological hazards in the study area. This study demonstrates the potential that analysis of historical sources holds when it comes to enhancing the understanding of current hydrological risk mitigation.

Born within seven months of each other, the two Edwards, Ackerman (1911-1973) and Ullman (1912-1976), were often reckoned the smartest, most capable American geographers of their cohort. Their conception of geography, their projects, their successes and disappointments, shed critical light on the development of US geography during the key transition to a post-War American 'high-modern' society. Drawing on sizable archival holdings, particularly the life-time correspondence between the two men, the purpose of the paper is to use the lives of Ackerman and Ullman to exemplify and to understand the mid-century professionalization of American geography. Their lives, and the geographical discipline to which they contributed, were drawn into an expanded interventionist modernist US state that valued scientific expertise, instrumental reason, problem solving, collective inquiry, and credentialism. These were tasks to which the two Edwards initially devoted themselves. The results were in the end mixed, but they set the stage for the quantitative revolution and later various anxieties within American geography that continued for the rest of the century. The paper will review the life of the two Edwards in conjunction with developments in American geography and society from the mid-1930s when they were students. It becomes clear that they were exponents of the drive to professionalize and modernize the antiquated discipline of American geography. The lives of the two Edwards were thus profoundly inscribed within the history of the 20th century US geography and its transformations. The personal was professional.

As part of a wider petition calling for anglophone geographers to rally more resolutely behind a dedicated normative project, in this article I make the case for dusting down and giving new life to Richard L. Morrill’s presidential address delivered at the annual meeting of the Association of American Geographers (AAG) in Denver in 1983 and titled ‘The responsibility of Geography’. Notwithstanding endlessly proselytizing same, anglophone geographers lack a common understanding of to what it means to prosecute a responsible geography. Indeed, haunted by past misdeeds, they have come see virtue in historicising, provincializing and pluralising the practice of taking responsibility and to commend responsibilising geography from multiple heartlands and indeed multiple peripheries. Whilst meritorious such polyvocality also comes with jeopardy for a small discipline with limited resources and no collectively agreed public mission cannot impact and influence this world. Drawing upon Antionio Gramsci and Nancy Frasers idea of ‘interregnum’, I argue that engulfed in a twenty first century polycrisis, it is incumbent upon anglophone geographers to swarm more purposively around a shared statement of social purpose and agenda for social transformation. My contention is that fashioned as it was during the early days of an interregnum, Richard L Morrill’s science based radical social democratic manifesto for a responsible geography

The United Nation’s Ocean Decade calls for knowledge-production and governance to create “the science we need for the Ocean we want” (UN Ocean Decade) gave impetus to a large number of citizen science (CS) initiatives in marine context. However, when applied to marine research CS is still hampered by some practical and heuristic limitations. The paper presents and analyses the pilot work of the EU sub-project “SeaPaCS _Participatory Citizen Science against marine pollution” conducted in a mid-size coastal Mediterranean city in Italy, with the aim to raise awareness about the presence of marine plastic pollution; and to trigger bottom-up agency for sustainability-oriented behaviours. Elaborating on lesson-learned during the project, the paper discusses whether and to what extent a participatory, transdisciplinary/transectoral and critical approach may help addressing these limiting factors and to generate transformative knowledge in application contexts. Notably, it consider how a fully participatory CS process, deploying social and biological analytic methods, and mobilising broad collaboration network can help at overcoming the extractive approach of traditional marine CS, the inaccessibility of the oceanic environment for lay citizen, the citizens’ disengagement connected to their scarce interest for the investigated issue, and the lack of long-lasting impacts. Moreover, engaging with critical ocean studies in geographical research, the paper suggest a participatory and critical approach to marine CS can produce transformative results and stimulate follow-up initiatives.

The rate of loss of biodiversity (terrestrial and marine) is one of the nine critical environmental thresholds associated with subsystems or biophysical systems of the planet, beyond which the Earth system would undergo unsustainable, sudden and irreversible environmental changes. This factor is profoundly influenced by climate change and human practices, elements that are leading to the reduction and fragmentation of habitats and the development of a series of important physiological consequences within the species most affected by these phenomena. Among these, the so-called keystone species and umbrella species are certainly of extreme interest, that is, those species that are fundamental for the balance and survival of the ecosystems that host them, and are therefore able, with their presence or absence, to constitute indicators of the well-being of these biomes. In this context, the policies implemented at a national and international scale by political actors and the presence of centers specialized in the protection and care of these wild species are therefore fundamental. Therefore, taking inspiration from these considerations, this research, through the observation and mapping of the phenomena that are involving sea turtles in the Mediterranean and the analysis of a specific case study, the Sea Turtle Rescue Centre (STRC) located within the Natural History Museum of Salento (Calimera - LE), aims to underline how top-down policies mixed with bottom-up actions - in a perspective of protection linked to the mitigation of the consequences of anthropic practices and therefore compensation for the impacts of modernity - can be considered not only as actions to mitigate the impacts of the Anthropocene, but also as a first step towards the return to cooperation between humans and other animals as a method of adaptation, resilience and resistance of the inhabitants of the Earth to climate change.

Humans have profound historical and cultural connections with marine and coastal environments. Research has traditionally focused on the role of marine environments in providing food, economic resources, and recreational opportunities. However, intangible and relational dimensions, such as spiritual, symbolic, and cultural connections to the sea, have received comparatively less attention. Additionally, while regions like the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans have received significant attention in marine research, studies in the Mediterranean Basin have often focused on ecological, economic, and policy-driven topics, with limited exploration of intangible and relational human-sea dimensions.

To identify the extent of research addressing these gaps and establish the state of the art in human-sea interactions within the Mediterranean, a systematic literature search was undertaken.

This systematic literature review investigates the question: What are the different dimensions of human-sea interactions in the Mediterranean? The study examines how these interactions have been conceptualized and studied, focusing on methods, conceptual lenses, and thematic emphases. Key areas of interest include the interpretation of cultural heritage, the role of Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) in integrating cultural elements, and the incorporation of intangible cultural heritage into marine conservation strategies.

Using a structured search strategy and following the PRISMA guidelines, the review identifies studies exploring human-environment relationships in the Mediterranean. The analysis categorizes research by methodological approaches, specific dimensions of human-sea interactions, the extent of conservation strategies’ engagement with cultural heritage, integration of broader spatial and temporal dynamics, and the types of human-nature connections (HNC) addressed.

Preliminary findings reveal variability in how human-sea interactions are conceptualized and studied. Conservation strategies, while frequently cited as tools for biodiversity protection, often lack frameworks to incorporate cultural heritage or address the interplay between human and ecological systems. Similarly, MPAs, despite their prominence, are underutilized in engaging with cultural elements. Furthermore, many studies emphasize instrumental approaches to Local Ecological Knowledge (LEK), often overlooking its ontological and epistemological foundations.

By synthesizing existing knowledge and identifying research gaps, this study highlights opportunities to better integrate cultural and ecological perspectives in Mediterranean marine conservation. It emphasizes the importance of considering relational, symbolic, and identity-based dimensions to foster sustainable and inclusive marine governance.

Mediterranean marine ecosystems have been degrading at a pace and scale at which conservation measures alone are insufficient to halt the decline in biodiversity and ecosystem functioning. Anthropogenic activities such as overfishing, pollution and tourism are among the most impactful drivers of this degradation. At the same time, coastal communities in the Mediterranean Sea are exposed to a complex series of socioeconomic and political issues that impact their ability to address the environmental degradation of the Mediterranean sea, further compounded by accelerated climate change. However, the sustainable use of marine biological resources and a shift in practices could help tackle the needs of coastal communities while improving the ecological status of Mediterranean ecosystems. Citizen science and integrated bottom-up management approaches have the potential to successfully increase the effectiveness of the conservation and restoration of marine biodiversity.

Within this context, the MEDiverSEAty project aims to explore the relationship between humans and biodiversity by involving citizens in its conservation and to answer the following research question “What are the different human dimensions in the protection and conservation of Mediterranean marine biodiversity?”. To address this question, the project integrates human and biological dimensions through a doctoral network of 10 PhD students from a variety of disciplines-including geography, marine biology, philosophy, anthropology, engineering, political science -across six European Mediterranean countries (Spain, Italy, France, Malta, Montenegro and Greece).

Each PhD focuses on a key aspect of coastal communities and marine biodiversity, such as Human-Nature Connectedness (HNC), Local Ecological Knowledge (LEK), gender dynamics, Marine Protected Areas (MPAs), Integrated Coastal Zone Management (ICZM), fisheries management, socio-economic impact of microplastic pollution, and perceptions on biodiversity. By connecting these dimensions, MEDiverSEAty is developing a common theoretical framework for Mediterranean Marine Biodiversity Conservation, applying mixed-methods to generate policy recommendations and applied-research outcomes. The collected knowledge will be synthesized through workshops, seminars, project meetings and a concluding MEDiverSEAty symposium. By integrating human dimensions into biodiversity conservation, MEDiverseaty aims to foster long-term impacts on national and EU-level planning and governance strategies for a sustainable and holistic management of marine resources.