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.

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.

The need for transformative geographical education is often justified by the general crisis nature of current processes. (cf. e.g. Nöthen/Schreiber 2023) In relation to the educational context, this implies a double crisis structure. On the one hand, this specifically concerns the education system and therefore also the subject of geography. On the other hand, the statement generally refers to the numerous crises with which late modern society is confronted, which is expressed not least in an acute crisis of meaning (cf. Schauer 2023). After the end of the grand narratives (Lyotard) and against the backdrop of an increasing questioning of modern narratives of progress and development (cf. e.g. Jaeggi 2023), education as a process for the empowerment of reflective shaping of the future must offer possibilities for dealing with the crisis narratives themselves. Crisis therefore not only functions here as a justification for the necessity of transformative education, but also as a central field of application for didactics based on this. It is argued that, although crisis knowledge is stressful, dealing with dystopian narratives (catastrophic crisis narratives) can also be implemented profitably independently of the decidedly problem-solving focus (e.g. Hoffmann 2021).

Consequently, this contribution asks how dystopian narratives (catastrophic crisis narratives) can be dealt with in terms of transformative geographical education. To this end, the concept of transformativity and the ‘guiding ideas’ of Nöthen and Schreiber (2023, 1) are used to discuss transformative education as a process of shaping the world in a way that is open to the future. Shaping the world, because transformation should be a conscious, meaningful process and not an arbitrary change. Future-oriented, as transformation is only legitimised in an educational context if it relates to the (increasingly threatened) future and includes a vision of it. Open, as transformative, unlike development, does not imply a normative narrative with clear guidelines for shaping the world, but instead means empowering people to shape their own narrative.

It is argued that world shaping, future-orientation and openness of this process each take place on three levels: 1) learning as transformation (subject level), 2) transformation of learning (system level), 3) transformation of the world (societal level). Following the conceptual-theoretical foundation outlined here, the aim is therefore to show the respective consequences of the levels presented for dealing with crisis narratives, so that these are not only experienced as oppressive challenges, but also act as an impetus for a narrative transformation with regard to a democratic and emancipatory, conscious shaping of the world. What this means in concrete terms is illustrated using a film example.

The current global landscape, marked by crises such as climate change, populism, and social inequalities, presents significant challenges for education. Geography education, with its inherent focus on the interconnections between society, economy, politics, and the environment, is uniquely positioned to address these issues. However, beyond content, teaching methods must also evolve to meet the needs of today’s students.

In response to this, the approach of Transformative (Geographic) Education has recently been increasingly discussed in geography didactics. However, the methodological and didactic recommendations presented in most of the publications associated with this approach often conflict with the structural and institutional logics inherent to the (German) school system. I argue that a fundamental reorientation of the structural and organizational framework of schooling is necessary to enable a more transformative (geographic) education in the first place. Accordingly, the focus of my research project is on the systemic and structural conditions necessary for this.

Considering its overarching goals and principles, as well as the structural framework within which the Dutch alternative educational approach Developmental Education (Ontwikkelingsgericht Onderwijs, ‘OGO’) (e. g. van Oers 2012) operates—and drawing on the argument that alternative educational approaches "can serve as meaningful models for the renewal of mainstream education across the globe" (Sliwka 2008: 108)— I propose that ‘OGO’ can provide valuable insights when it comes to define a framework in which Transformative (Geographic) Education might become possible. Using ethnographic methods, I therefore intended to explore the actual potential of ‘OGO’ in relation to my aforementioned research interest in a school in the Netherlands. In doing so, I explored key characteristics, implicit logics and success factors of ‘OGO’ that cannot be derived from its theoretical study alone.

By presenting first findings, my presentation will contribute to the discourse on integrating Transformative (Geographic) Education into practice. Through illustrative examples, I will discuss in how far ‘OGO’ can help defining structural, pedagogical and didactical adjustments necessary to support an education that not only addresses both the intellectual and emotional needs of students, but also fosters the development of critical thinking and agency, as well as resilience—required skills to navigate and actively engage in this increasingly complex world.

• Van Oers, B. (Ed.) (2012): Developmental Education for Young Children. Concept, Practice and Implementation. (Springer) Dordrecht.
• Sliwka, A. (2008): The contribution of alternative education. In: OECD – centre for Educational Research and Innovation: Innovating to learn – learning to innovate. (OECD) Paris.

Our prior collaboration, which integrated history and geography education through primary sources and combined teaching and research, highlighted shared value-based issues, which we see as a foundation for cooperative teaching. The lecturers assumed that students were interested in clarifying these issues. Developing teaching methods for students from diverse countries, religions, and backgrounds laid the foundation for joint learning, facilitated discussions, and encouraged the study of various humanitarian issues in the past and present. This collaborative approach improves students' learning experience by enabling them to engage with peers from diverse backgrounds.

The teaching objectives were to expose the students to moral value issues during the past, mainly Shoa education, and to make them investigate worldwide moral value issues today. A key focus was exploring avenues for personal involvement in humanitarian aid. This research asks how students from different backgrounds, religions, etc., approach ethical issues and what are the influencing factors that determine this?

Humanitarian emergencies arise from natural disasters, such as earthquakes or floods, or man-made causes including wars and human rights violations. Humanitarian aid is provided by groups, individuals, organizations (UN or USAID, for example), or nations. Significant differences exist in the type and scope of humanitarian aid provided to affected populations, often due to geopolitical factors: for example, action can be localized, or global aid, addressing health, economic, or other needs, and help is possible in a small geographic area or a large area. Assistance can range from immediate relief to long-term support.

Teaching methods combine online and distance learning tools, including films, Online resources, and Zoom. These tools supported Problem-Based Learning and discussions of ethical dilemmas. Learning in small, mixed-group work allows the students to get to know each other and build connections across cultural boundaries. Peer teaching is a fundamental issue of this study and will be discussed in this presentation.

Students' opinions, perceptions, and attitudes were examined at various stages of the process, and they will serve as a basis for comparative research. The students and lecturers from three continents consider this course a unique opportunity to engage in fascinating, valuable, and meaningful topics.

Transformative education, as a pedagogical approach, aims to empower learners to critically engage with complex global challenges, such as climate change, migration, and sustainability, by fostering systemic understanding and civic responsibility. Within this context, geography provides a unique platform to implement transformative education due to its focus on the interconnections between society, economy, politics, and the environment. This paper explores how transformative education principles can be operationalized in geography teaching by examining the cognitive processes involved in solving complex geographical tasks.

The study focused on transformative learning - the process by which students change their perspectives and develop new ways of understanding the world - and analysed the problem-solving strategies of 14 gifted high school students (aged 16-19) identified as gifted in geography in the national round of the Geography Olympiad. Using eye-tracking technology (Tobii Glasses 2), participants' visual attention was measured while solving model problems from the International Geography Olympiad (iGeo). These tasks required the integration of spatial and thematic data from maps, diagrams and textual descriptions in English. Supplementary qualitative data from post-task interviews were used to contextualize the findings from eye-tracking.

The analysis revealed that linguistic complexity in task instructions and an overemphasis on fact-based content posed significant obstacles to transformative learning. Students exhibited prolonged fixations on textual elements, suggesting cognitive overload, which hindered their ability to engage in higher-order reasoning. Tasks emphasizing open-ended inquiry and problem-solving, however, demonstrated potential for fostering transformative learning, as they encouraged students to synthesize information and critically evaluate global interdependencies.

This study argues for the integration of transformative education principles into geography curricula by prioritizing task designs that support transformative learning processes. Recommendations include incorporating problem-based questions, fostering critical reasoning, and providing linguistic scaffolding to reduce cognitive barriers. By aligning educational practices with transformative education, geography teaching can better equip students to critically engage with and address the complexities of an interconnected world.

Emotions and their role in sustainability and (transformative) sustainability education have become more frequently discussed in the ESD and the geography education discourse (Schickl et al. 2024; Pettig & Ohl 2023; Grund et al. 2023). While there is a shifting focus away from predominantly understanding emotions as a tool for behavioral change towards a more complex approach to emotions, there are still many open questions on how to navigate emotions on sustainability in the ESD classroom. In current discussions a focus on negative emotions such as ‘climate anxiety’ (Pihkala 2020) and a connection to nature as emotional experience leading to behavioral change (Chawla 2020) is evident. A psychological and individualized understanding of emotions takes center stage in these approaches. While (environmental) psychology provides valuable insights into the interplay of psyche, environment, and sustainability, a more interdisciplinary understanding of and approach to emotions which considers how emotions are embedded in social contexts can further enhance our understanding of emotions and their role in the transformative ESD classroom.

An understanding of emotions as social phenomenon and more specifically a form of social practice, foregrounds emotions as embodied behavioral routines based on collective and implicit knowledge (Scheer 2019). This theoretical approach challenges the common understanding of emotions as individual experiences and allows emotions to be understood within their social context. It further highlights how emotions can be shaped by social interactions and collective contexts, and how these practices can be enacted and reinforced but also questioned and disrupted in the ESD classroom by engaging students in collective action towards their desired future(s).

This presentation explores the potential of approaching emotions as social phenomena for sustainability education in the context of transformative geography teaching. It discusses this potential through selected insights from the participatory Photovoice project EAT+CHANGE, in which 13-14-year-old students critically engage with (un)sustainable food systems.

Grund, J., Singer-Brodowski, M., & Büssing, A. (2023). Emotions and transformative learning for sustainability: A systematic review. Sustainability Science. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11625-023-01439-5

Pettig, F., & Ohl, U. (2023). Transformatives Lernen für einen sozial-ökologischen Wandel: Facetten eines zukunftsfähigen Geographieunterrichts. https://opus.bibliothek.uni-augsburg.de/opus4/frontdoor/index/index/docId/100871

Pihkala, P. (2020). Eco-Anxiety and Environmental Education. Sustainability, 12(23), Article 23. https://doi.org/10.3390/su122310149

Scheer, M. (2019). Emotion als kulturelle Praxis. In H. Kappelhoff, J.-H. Bakels, H. Lehmann, & C. Schmitt (Hrsg.), Emotionen: Ein interdisziplinäres Handbuch (S. 352–362). J.B. Metzler. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-476-05353-4_50

Schickl, M., Oberauer, K., Stötter, J., Kromp-Kolb, H., & Keller, L. (2024). makingAchange – eine der bislang umfassendsten Klimawandelbildungsinitiativen Österreichs. Erkenntnisse zu Wirkungsweisen und einer dringend notwendigen Transformation in der Klimawandelbildung. GW Unterricht, 173, 7–19. https://doi.org/10.1553/gw-unterricht173s7

Singer-Brodowski, M., Förster, R., Eschenbacher, S., Biberhofer, P., & Getzin, S. (2022). Facing Crises of Unsustainability: Creating and Holding Safe Enough Spaces for Transformative Learning in Higher Education for Sustainable Development. Frontiers in Education, 7. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/feduc.2022.787490

In 2015, the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, with its 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), was adopted by all member states of the United Nations (UN) (UN, 2015). SDG 8 still aims for economic growth, although economic growth as a guiding principle of an economic system is increasingly criticized for promoting unsustainable development (Harvey, 2012). Transforming the current economic system is even seen as a condition for reaching the SDGs (Göpel, 2016). Alternative approaches that are characterized by detaching from the current economic growth system are covered by the term post growth (Schulz et al. 2021). As young people’s involvement is central for shaping our future, the topic of post growth offers great potential in the context of Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) and transformative learning.

Therefore, a seminar on post growth has been developed for students enrolled in a bachelors programme of teacher training and was conducted at two universities in Lower Saxony, Germany. As part of the seminar, the students explored the topic of post growth and identified connecting points to geography education. Subsequently, they designed their own lesson on the topic of post growth and conducted it in small groups with an 11th-grade class at a secondary school. The subsequent structured reflection was recorded and the qualitative data obtained is being evaluated in order to develop and conduct a teaching unit on post growth at a secondary school in the context of ESD and transformative education.

Selected results from the students' reflections and the derived implications for the development of the teaching unit and the transformative educational process will be presented and discussed.

Transformative action is needed more than ever to change our societies and preserve an inhabitable planet for current and future generations. Young people are one of the groups affected the most by the continuously growing impact the climate crisis will have, but they are also key actors in the societal transformation that is necessary to curb global warming and adapt to our changing world (UNESCO, 2020). However, studies have shown that while young people are aware of the importance of sustainable behaviour, their attitudes often do not match their behaviour, resulting in a persistent attitude-behaviour-gap (Bernardes et al, 2018; Entzian, 2015).
From 2021 to 2025, the project “Low-Emission-Schools in Northern Germany (LESSCO2)” addressed this gap: Drawing on Education for Sustainable development (ESD) and transformative learning, it aimed to foster learners’ transformative literacy (Singer-Brodowski & Schneidewind, 2014) to enable them to act (more) sustainably and become change agents (UNESCO, 2020), thus possibly bridging the gap and contributing to transformative action. To this end, a concept for a project week that included learners as well as teacher candidates was designed and subsequently implemented in northern German secondary schools: During each project week, pupils developed ideas for projects which aimed to reduce the amount of greenhouse gases emitted by their school. Areas they focused their ideas on were mobility, energy, food and resources/waste. Teacher candidates, who were trained to implement the project weeks, supported learners in developing their ideas.
The presentation will discuss exemplary results and experiences of the implementation phase. It will also reflect critically on the project week design regarding its potential to foster transformative literacy and initiate transformative learning.

“’Healthy living on a healthy planet’ is a critical and timely synthesis of priority transformations needed in governance, research, planning, and education at all scales, to promote the health and well-being of every individual, today and in the future, while simultaneously healing the damage from and preventing further climate change, biodiversity loss, and pollution” (Ebi 2023).

Within these contexts, education plays a pivotal role (Sustainable Development Goal 4) when taught from a critical-emancipatory (ESD II) and/or transformative perspective (ESD III) (Vare/Scott 2007). Learners should be empowered, motivated, and inspired to act as change agents or pioneers of transformation, initiating fundamental changes. Concepts for teaching and learning settings that develop and implement these ideas in educational practice already exist, such as service learning, critical mapping, or learning workshops. For sustainable and effective implementation, however, the regional context is of outstanding importance. learners can test their own transformative action strategies in the local environment, directly observe their effectiveness and implement an alternative approach if necessary (Wittlich/Mönter/Lathan 2024). The Competence Center for Regional Learning at the University of Vechta, combines research and practical work with various stakeholders thus create a transformative educational network for learners and educators.

The presentation will showcase, contextualize, and open for discussion the recently improved educational concept of the Competence Center. Additionally, it will provide insights into the transformative network collaboration with schools, companies, and other institutions. Exemplary of this, two current qualification projects will be presented, which focus on further theoretical grounding of the concept, based on investigations into two learning modules tested in several german schools. The qualification projects are particularly emphasizing how transformative learning can further the communicative competences of students in the context of current challenges as well as how students’ action skills in context of climate change adaption can be developed effectively. The presentation will include significant empirical findings of both studies and reflect practical and theoretical challenges concerning the implementation of the developed learning modules into practice.

Ebi, K. (2023): Voices to the WBGU flagship report 2023. URL: https://www.wbgu.de/de/publikationen/publikation/gesundleben

Vare, P. & Scott, W. (2007). Learning for a change: Exploring the relationship between education for sustainable development. Journal of Education for Sustainable Development, 1(2), 191–198. https://doi.org/10.1177/097340820700100209

Wittlich, C., Mönter, L., & Lathan, H. (2024). Planetary Health and Education for Sustainable Development: An integrative approach with focus on climate change-related human health risks and their Thematisation in school contexts. Journal of Education for Sustainable Development, 17(2), 200-217. https://doi.org/10.1177/09734082241238087

Sustainability issues are characterized by a tension between the urgency of the addressed problems and democratic decision-making structures. This tense relationship is also the subject of an ongoing debate in the field of ESD between normative and pluralistic approaches. Whereas the latter emerged out of a critique of the normativity of ESD practices and position themselves as committed to an emancipatory educational interest (van Poeck et al. 2014), they also face certain challenges, among other things, their handling of relativism (Tryggvason et al. 2023). Questions such as if every opinion is equally valid in pluralistic discussions – and if not, on the basis of what that could be decided – seem to become even more relevant in the current political climate characterized by post-truth debates and openly discriminatory positions.

Building on Haraway’s (1988) considerations on relativism that “the ‘equality’ of positioning is a denial of responsibility and critical inquiry” I want to question whether the pluralization of viewpoints is the most appropriate response to the criticism of a totalization of a normatively based viewpoint – especially in times of urgent challenges. Given humanity’s dependence on ecological foundations and therefore the need to confront ecological crises now and with radical measures, Latour (2018), among others, argues for the need to (re-)interpret emancipation in a way that it is not understood as liberation from but as the ability to answer to (changeable) necessities of and with the world (Hoppe 2022). In this context, Hoppe (2019) – based on her engagement with Haraway – argues for the need of a critical sociology as an interplay of negativistic-destructive and affirmative-constructive practices and relations to the world (Hoppe 2019).

My argument is that these considerations hold significant potential to enhance ongoing educational discussions as well as concrete teaching practices. I want to focus on how those can be taken into account in teacher training. Drawing on an example from an ongoing research project, I want to discuss how joint reflections on authentic classroom situations are beneficial for learning process of (pre-service) teachers and how the above-mentioned theoretical perspectives can enrich the ESD-discourse with new perspectives.

Literature:

Haraway, D. (1988). Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective. In: Feminist Studies 14(3), 575–599.

Hoppe, K. (2022). Das Anthropozän kompostieren: Speziesübergreifende Verwandtschaft und sozialökologische Transformation In: Insert 2, 1–15.

Hoppe, K. (2019). Katharina Hoppe: Die Kraft der Revision. Epistemologie, Politik und Ethik bei Donna Haraway. Campus Verlag, Frankfurt am Main.

Latour, B. (2018). Das terrestrische Manifest. Suhrkamp Verlag, Berlin.

Tryggvason, Á., Öhman, J. & Van Poeck, K. (2023). Pluralistic environmental and sustainability education – a scholarly review. In: Environmental Education 29(10), 1460–1485.

Van Poeck, K., Goeminne, G. & Vandenabeele, J. (2014). Revisiting the democratic paradox of environmental and sustainability education: sustainability issues as matters of concern. In: Environmental Education Research 22(6), 1–21.

Transformative education describes an approach that intends to create new and hopeful paths for engaged teaching and learning in geography in times of crises. Those who align their pedagogical actions with this concept demonstrate a strong connection to, and responsibility for, their environment. In our presentation, we aim to place this concern at the center and, based on preliminary considerations in educational theory, introduce two method modules of an excursion concept. These are designed to facilitate embodied experiences of soil and surface worlds through affective practices of walking and listening.

First, we present a method that follows approaches of peripatetic (Kaiser 2020) and promenadology (Burckhardt 2006) and aims to raise awareness of and expand the conditions of environmental perception and experience from an aesthetic and cultural science perspective. Through perception experiments while walking—such as “strolling”, “taking detours”, and “thinking while walking”— participants are encouraged to sharpen their awareness of fractures and transformations in the peripheral areas of urban agglomerations. Second, we present a method module based on phenomenological approaches, designed to make barely heard sounds of various soils sensorially tangible. How does the forest floor sound? What noises are hidden under a cemetery or a street? How do the subterranean tones of a meadow differ from those of an urban ornamental lawn? We discuss to what extent listening carefully to the acoustic characteristics of the ground can contribute to a “re-sensitizing self-awareness” (“re-sensibilisierende Selbstgewahrwerdung”, Hasse 2022).

Finally, based on our experiences, we would like to discuss the extent to which these methods can enrich a transformative teaching practice in higher education. In particular, we aim to explore how they can encourage prospective teachers to actively engage in dialogue with our environment and critically question established teaching and learning routines—while also highlighting where the limitations of these approaches become evident.

Burckhardt, Lucius (2006). Warum ist Landschaft schön? Die Spaziergangswissenschaft. Berlin: Martin Schmitz.

Hasse, Jürgen (2022): Das Geräusch der Stadt. Phänomenologie des Lauten und Leisen. Baden-Baden: Verlag Karl Alber.

Kaiser, C. (2020). Peripatetik war schon immer ein SchreibenGehen. Kunstforum international, 48(266), 120-130.

As consumers of media-based information, teachers no longer obtain their educational materials solely from analogue formats, but are increasingly expanding their search for sources into digital spheres of knowledge. These must then be made didactically fruitful for media-supported teaching-learning situations in a producing attitude. Under current conditions of a culture of digitality, such a dual understanding of roles must be addressed in teacher training. In this respect, the contribution focusses on the perspective of teachers as prosuming storytellers. Based on a theoretical-conceptual elaboration of this attribution, an online training course entitled ‘Digital storytelling in the context of sustainability’ is presented, which is also used in a university context as a seminar for geography student teachers.

Storytelling as a didactic method is based on the described media starting point of digital educational practice in order to link complex circumstances, such as the climate crisis, with everyday experiences of pupils. In this way, young people should feel empowered to face the challenges in a meaningful and self-confident way. It is equally about facing up to emergence and unpredictability and finding a productive way of dealing with paralysing contradictions. Stories therefore require a narrative style that captures the diversity of the world and turns away from binary thought patterns. The experiences of others should become one's own source of knowledge, in that stories are not to be understood as closed knowledge, but as open to interpretation. Such narratives imply the possibility of trying out alternative approaches. As a result, the training concept is part of a didactically orientated, transformative ESD, which uses media representations to identify multi-perspective contexts. According to an emancipatory understanding, ESD endeavours to address corresponding values and attitudes and to strengthen knowledge and skills that are conducive to a sustainable way of life.

The submission presents digital storytelling as an innovative approach to contemporary sustainability communication by interweaving educational theory, (geography) didactics and journalistic perspectives. Building on this, the conceptual outline of a digital training programme forms the main focus of the presentation, which concludes with the initial practical experiences of teachers gathered in the course of reflection interviews.

The Anthropocene, i.e. the reconsideration of the Earth's habitability due to human activities, is challenging geography education (Joublot-Ferré, 2022; Gilbert, 2016). How can we teach students about the complex implications of this issue? We suggest to address this issue through a case study of urban prospective and spatial diagnosis in the context of planning an eco-neighborhood on a former military site in Fribourg (Switzerland), as part of a collaborative STEM (Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) research project (Roy, Masserey,Schumacher & Küttel, 2021). The students, aged between 12 and 13, mobilize and build various media such as maps, scale models as part of a field investigation including field trip and interviews with actors involved in the eco-neighborhood. This methodology is based both on geographers' and urban planners' professional skills (Calbérac, 2021; Gwiazdzinski & Cholat, 2021) and on research related to geography education at secondary school level on narrative cartography (Egiebor & Foster, 2020; Mukherjee, 2020) and geospatial education technologies (Healy & Walshe, 2020; Favier & Van der Schee, 2014; De Miguel González & De Lázaro Torres, 2020). It also engages students in an authentic context, giving meaning to their learning and fostering understanding and reflexive analysis of the complex issues involved in habitability. In addition to fieldwork, whose benefit with students is recognized (Efstratia, 2014, Fägerstam, 2014), the mobilization and making of artifacts is emphasized by several pedagogues to contribute to student learning (Ackermann, 2021; Papert, 1981). Thus, students in a spatial prospective approach develop their own visions of the upcoming eco-neighborhood through model-building. Building these models provides material for analyzing the challenges facing the eco-neighborhood, while integrating the issue of habitability in the context of the Anthropocene. The students' outputs (maps, scale models) are examined to evaluate the whole process to propose new research perspectives and to suggest recommendations for teachers in pre-service and in-service training interested in exploring such issues.

Marseilles’ central districts, where a number of working-class neighbourhoods persist, are grappling with multiple dynamics. Analysis of socio-spatial evolutions in these neighbourhoods show « simultaneous processes of gentrification and impoverishment » (Baby-Collin and Bouillon, 2017). The private housing stock which is predominant in this area, is faced with major deterioration issues, it is also subject to transformations as new investment strategies emerge. Drawing from a thesis low-end of rental market dynamics in Marseille’s central neighbourhoods (2018-2024), prolonged by a collective research project on the adaptation of the historic housing stock to climate change (Sustherit - 2024-2027), this intervention aims to examine the interplay between spatial transformations and how local stakeholders value ordinary urban heritage. The presentation is based on a qualitative survey of landlords, real estate agents and local public players, as well as an on an in-depth analysis of local urban projects and planning documents.

The paper will first focus on investment strategies in low-end segments of the private rental market, to show how several forms of rent extraction may co-exist in these neighbourhoods. Perception of urban heritage is one element which can shape private player’s investment strategies, especially in gentrifying neighbourhoods.

The second part of the paper will look at the role of public authorities. Since 2018 and the collapse of two buildings in the Noailles district, run-down housing has been back on the public agenda in the historic center. Prioritization of security issues has sometimes led to demolitions, but public action is steered towards retrofitting the historic housing stock. Renovations rely on, a public development company of national interest (SPLA-IN), which aims to provide an exemplary retrofitting model with careful consideration to environmental quality and heritage preservations. Costly for public authorities, this model cannot be replicated indefinitely. Outside of this scope of action, ordinary heritage is sometimes threatened of demolition when local authorities prioritize densification, real estate developments or transport infrastructure. This analysis will allow us to question which heritage is recognized and how public players' interest in ordinary heritage is also linked to spatial transformations.

The transformation of historic housing stock through private investments, developer-led interventions, and individual renovations presents a complex challenge to urban heritage preservation. As historic housing increasingly becomes an asset within global real estate markets, the traditional balance between preservation policies, local governance, and market dynamics is shifting. This is particularly evident in non-listed ordinary heritage—residential buildings that are culturally significant but lack formal heritage protection—where multiple actors play an increasingly dominant role in shaping transformation processes. In response to these challenges, new frameworks that integrate decarbonization strategies with heritage-sensitive renovation are necessary to address the socio-political, economic, and
environmental tensions emerging from these interventions.

This contribution presents the DeCO2 project, an EU-funded initiative aimed at developing dynamic decarbonization pathways for sustainable renovation in the built environment. The project’s social innovation as a Living Lab approach is exemplified at Terrassenhaussiedlung in Graz, Austria, a modernist housing estate that represents an important yet unofficially recognized segment of ordinary heritage. Here, participatory co-design processes engage residents, policymakers, and technical experts in developing energy-efficient renovations while preserving the estate’s architectural and social character. The approach integrates technological innovations such as energy monitoring systems and circular material use with social and policy-driven mechanisms that accommodate resident-led initiatives, investments, and regulatory flexibility. This contribution critically examines how community-driven, scalable, and transferable renovation strategies can reconcile the tensions between
sustainability goals, local identity, and the evolving dynamics of historic housing markets. It reflects on how market-driven transformations intersect with ordinary heritage conservation, highlighting the potential of the Living Lab methodology to mediate between economic pressures and cultural continuity. Through empirical insights from Terrassenhaussiedlung, this study contributes to the broader debate on heritage transformation, socio-technical innovation, and urban policy, offering a model for integrating preservation and sustainability in the evolving governance of historic residential environments.

The founder´s period, or the Gründerzeit (GHS) has been a period of historical significance in Vienna and Budapest, both formerly part of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. The area of both metropolises grew due to city expansions beyond the Medieval walls, accompanied by river regulation (Vadas, 2005a; Vadas 2005b), and other large-scale infrastructure projects (Csendes, 2005a; Csendes, 2005b; Hárs et. al., 2016), as well as residential development (Körner, 2010; Psenner, 2023). This resulted in a building stock with many comparable features, such as the Historicism architectural style, the organization in blocks with perimeter construction and inner courtyards, placed in regular grid street structures and many other aspects (Melinz & Zimmermann, 1966; Lélek, 2019; Psenner, 2023). The historical buildings stock is still represented in both cities, shaping their urban landscapes both in a physical form (Vienna 20%, Budapest 16% built before 1919) and as representation of cultural values (Hárs et. al., 2016; Peer & Psenner, 2024). However, recent socio-political processes originating from different political systems and regimes of the 20th century have affected these buildings. In Budapest, the process of privatisation has become a strong driving force behind transformation after the system change in 1989 and led to a high proportion of private and low proportion of municipal dwelling ownership (Cséfalvay & Rohn, 1992; Lichtenberger 1994). Although the ownership structure has also been changing in Vienna, it resulted from the circumstances given by legal instruments in a welfare state (Lichtenberger, 1990). The legal conversion (“Parifizierung”) of tenement buildings shifted individual or shared building ownership to the ownership of dwellings and the proportional shares of common areas according to federal state-wide regulations1. As local and international financial institutions started to see investment opportunities in this historical housing after the year 2000, their intervention through commodification have started to shape this historical building stock in favourable locations, either by demolition and new construction, or by rooftop extension and renovation (Musil et. al., 2021). In our research project TransHerit, one of the scopes of the research is to investigate and compare how financialization processes, housing regulation and preservation, as well as market dynamic of GHS in Vienna and Budapest have transformed the tangible preservation of this historic housing stock. In the scope of this session, we would like to present our preliminary findings and shed light on what this could mean in term of heritage regime.

The reuse of buildings offers substantial environmental, economic, and social benefits, presenting a sustainable alternative to new construction and urban sprawl. However, the multidisciplinary nature of building reuse, especially in historic residential buildings, involves diverse stakeholders with often conflicting interests, such as heritage preservation, financial viability, and environmental efficiency. These complexities pose significant challenges.

This study aims to identify and classify the challenges associated with the reuse of residential buildings from a multidisciplinary perspective. It also explores the relationships between these challenges and their occurrence at various scales, addressing the core research question: What are the key challenges and conflicts of interest that hinder decision-making in the reuse of residential buildings?

Through a semi-systematic literature review combined with thematic analysis, the study identifies 75 sub-challenges categorized into 10 overarching themes: : (1) economic viability and financial challenges, (2) building conditions, (3) design-technical challenges, (4) location challenges, (5) decision making, (6) policy and regulations, (7) knowledge, capacity, and skills, (8) culture, perception, and awareness, (9) surrounding community, and (10) timeline. The findings highlight strong interconnections among these themes, with financial viability emerging as a critical influence on many other aspects.

Existing research on building reuse often adopts a narrow disciplinary focus, lacks a holistic multidisciplinary perspective, and overlooks the interplay between different challenges, particularly in residential buildings. This study addresses these gaps by providing a conceptual framework that categorizes the challenges of residential building reuse across multiple disciplines. By categorizing these challenges, the conceptual framework serves as a resource for policymakers, researchers, and educators in understanding the complexities of building reuse. In addition, it can be utilized to further develop strategies, policies, and decision-support tools to effectively address these challenges.

Urbicide, the deliberate destruction of urban spaces, is traditionally understood as the physical annihilation of architecture and infrastructure during conflict (Bevan, 2006). This paper argues there is an expanded definition that includes disregard for public memory and historical significance in favour of investor-led urbanism. The case of Belgrade’s Generastaff Building exemplifies this process. Once a symbol of Yugoslav modernism and later a ruin memorialising the 1999 NATO aggression, the site is now at the centre of controversial privatisation effort. It is arguably a textbook example of how governments in their pursuit of foreign capital redefine national heritage as disposable. At the same time, it is a textbook example of the nuances of a post-conflict environment and a need for consideration of historical trauma, as the site has been in a stalemate for decades, with each proposal exacerbating the issue rather than moving towards a solution (Jovic, 2022).

Serbian government's recent agreement with a private investor marks a significant shift in the timeline of this heritage site. While officials claim revitalising it will contribute to Belgrade’s economic future, critics argue its erasure and/or adaptation to proposed space of leisure constitutes an erasure of historical - and recent, therefore still painful memory. This paper argues it can further be understood as an act of urbicide in peacetime, interrogates ideas of urbicide (Coward, 2004; 2009) that occurs through economic policies rather than warfare, and questions ethical implications of prioritising capital over collective historical memory. It contributes to broader discussions on post-conflict urbanism, memory politics and neoliberal developments.

Through Critical Discourse Analysis of media narratives, government policies, and urban planning documents, this paper examines how state actors, private investors, and civil society organisations frame the Generalstaff Building debate. While the former push for its understanding as a modernisation strategy, opposing voices agree it follows a pattern of investor-driven urban transformations that prioritise profit over memory, echoing similar critiques of projects like Belgrade Waterfront (Slavkovic, 2013). The discourse of progress and economic growth, championed by political elites, often marginalises or silences counter-discourses advocating for historical preservation and - particularly pertinent for post-conflict environments, public participation.

Bevan, R., 2006. The destruction of memory: architecture at war.

Coward, M., 2004. Urbicide in Bosnia. Cities, War, and Terrorism: towards an urban geopolitics, pp.154-171.

Coward, M., 2009. The Logic of Urbicide. Urbicide. The Politics of Urban Destruction.

Jović, M., 2022. Post-Conflict Branding. Encyclopedia of Tourism Management and Marketing. Edward Elgar Publishing.

Slavkovic, Lj. 2013. Camenzind Magazine, Issue #2. Accessed at http://www.camenzindbelgrade.com/ on February 10, 2016.

In the center of the city of Madrid is located the so-called Paseo del Prado and Buen Retiro, Landscape of Arts and Sciences, the official name of which is known as Landscape of Light. This site was inscribed on the World Heritage List in July 2021. It is the first tree-lined promenade in a European capital, created in the 16th century to offer the inhabitants of Madrid a spatial environment conducive to leisure and relaxation in a wooded setting. Located in the patrimonial and symbolic heart of the city, it has been configured for many years as a highly institutionalized space with an important cultural and touristic dimension.

The work is based on the study of the urban dynamics driven by private initiative, mainly companies of different sizes and orientations. The aim is to investigate the scope that the declaration as a World Heritage site has had on the real estate dynamics of this central area of the city. Some of these dynamics are linked to the renewal of the residential fabric, the establishment and renovation of hotels, the change in first floor businesses, the transformation of dwellings into tourist rental housing, or changes in the office market trends. The starting point is the idea that in recent years there has been a (re)valorization and (re)significance in cultural and, above all, touristic terms of this space, already highly institutionalized and with a high symbolic value. However, it is necessary to determine whether the declaration as World Heritage has had a significant influence on these processus and the tensions that private economic interests generate over the conservation of a legacy in transformation.

To this end, three of the dimensions that are influencing recent socio-spatial transformations will be analysed: 1). Through field work and comparative cartographic analysis, the dynamics of change in land use in the area under study will be studied; 2). Using land registry sources and real estate portals, the dynamics affecting residential and tertiary use will be analysed; and 3). Through documentary analysis we will review the major projects that are putting this urban space in the cultural and tourist marking from the private initiative, whether they are implementations of cultural headquarters and foundations dependent on large companies and banking corporations or the opening and / or remodelling of luxury hotels.

In a world hurtling towards ecological breakdown, the concept of time is of growing concern. According to the UN Secretary General, "we are now engaged in a race against time to adapt to a rapidly changing climate" (UN, 2024). The world is running out of time.

But which - and whose - time are we talking about? Reducing the question to quantitative 'objective time', arguably a technological construct (Bastian, 2017), might prompt one to paraphrase Cedric Price (1966): technology is the answer, but what is the question?

In the industrial-capitalist credo, "time is money" (Adam, 2003). This simple motto enshrines the quantitative perception of time espoused by much large-scale urban development as a seemingly stable, objective, quantifiable value. However, in the context of large developments within urban UNESCO World Heritage (WH) sites, global heritage governance can play an active role in differentiating between qualitative and quantitative concerns for the future.

Employing desk-based research of primary and secondary literature, this paper will analyse and compare approaches to time taken in contentious major urban developments at two UK WH sites: Liverpool and Edinburgh. The former WH site was delisted in 2021 as a result of its approach (WHC, 2021). The latter escaped - possibly accidentally - a similar fate, seen to have addressed UNESCO concerns dating back to 2008.

Might delisting, for urban WH sites under heavy development pressure, just be a matter of time?

Drawing on scholarship on the theme of "social time" (Luhmann, 1976; Bastian, 2016), this paper will chart the first hints of what might be termed 'World Heritage chrononomy', UNESCO's management of time within inscribed WH sites, with a particular focus on large prospective urban developments. In turn, the WH system's qualitative approaches to post-inscription temporalities might be recognized as an important contribution to a unified global governance response to the global ecological crisis.

Urban landscapes are testimony, through their changes, to the dynamic relationship between society and its environment, which simultaneously reflect and condition each other’s characteristics and evolution over time. The Old and New Towns of Edinburgh World Heritage Site presents a fascinating insight in these dynamics over the last decades. Starting with the end of the nineteenth century, when Patrick Geddes applied his principle of ‘conservative surgery’ to a series of Old Town buildings, Edinburgh had seen the rise of a heritage movement that had successfully put a halt to the ambitious post-war urban development plans of the University which clashed with those of the city and its residents. This remained the case until the turn of the 21st century, since when a series of large-scale developments have been promoted by the council, to be erected by private developers, some of them despite strong opposition from residents and local stakeholders. The latter, tourism-focused large-scale developments had seen entire campaigns mounted by local community groups, inspections by UNESCO missions, and high-profile public inquiries. The tensions between the interests of investors, administration, community, and heritage were laid bare in the process. Other city-focused proposals, however, had the support of the local community and heritage stakeholders. This paper will reflect on the way in which the urban fabric of Edinburgh has been shaped by this series of recent large-scale developments and their implications for the historic city and its residents.

By means of a micro-level study conducted in the arid Western Pamirs of Tajikistan, it will be shown how self-organized management practices, collaborative action, and pragmatic technical solutions fed by local knowledge contribute to addressing the spatiotemporally uneven water supply for irrigation. The findings reveal that local-specific water management and irrigation arrangements prove to be essential not only for local agriculture and food production, but also a means of social organization and a central instrument for the equitable utilization of locally available natural resources, along with balancing interests within the community. The study also shows how collaborative resource use and management contribute to community cohesion and individual survival in a society that is struggling with manifold social and ecological challenges. The empirically based insights contribute to a better understanding of how social and ecological challenges related to societal transitions and global change can be tackled ‘from below.’

The city of Prague today has an unparalleled number of fruit orchards in its territory owned and managed by the city for the benefit of its public, which have been handed down through the many social and political changes of its history. The beauty, productivity and value of these spaces is palpable in their vibrancy and popular usage, maintained as they are by the Department of Environmental Protection according to a clear program and a clear set of perceived sources of value (ecology, recreation, aesthetics, cultural heritage, production). However, due to practical constraints, the city has boundaries to the work it can do to maintain these public goods. Beyond these boundaries, the city department relies on an informal/un-formed network of civil society organizations (CSOs) and private individuals to conduct the remaining work essential to the reproduction of the value of the common goods embodied by its orchards. The city department conducts the foundational ecological work, but relies on CSOs and private individuals to harvest and circulate the fruit, to integrate these places into urban lifeways and civic identity, and so on. Through the coordination of the city, the CSOs and the individuated public, the orchards sustain their value, despite this formal/informal arrangement.

Using the theoretical frameworks of legal-normative pluralism and actor-network theory to analyze ethnographic data collected by the author in support of their Master’s thesis work during the years 2023-2024, this contribution seeks to answer how the multiple stakeholders invested in the many public orchards in the city of Prague co-produce the sustainability of these common goods. How are rights, responsibilities, norms, valuations, and disciplinary practices distributed and performed to ensure the sustainability of these public/common resources? How do actor networks drive transformations in the meanings and management of Prague’s public property?

This paper adapts Petr Jehlička’s concept describing Czech sustainability practices, to an account of how different public and private actors co-produce the productivity and value of these public orchards. Quiet commoning practices emerging in Prague’s public orchards, sustained by a civic-ecological habitus (as in Jehlička’s analyses) and distributed among a receptive actor network, offer an image of democratized agency in the post-socialist urban realm; a model of quiet and sustainable processes which transform public goods into common ones for the common benefit of Prague’s residents; a source of inspiration for ways of organizing resilience despite social disruptions and transformations.

Gardening is integral to urban sustainability, but not all urban gardens receive equal support. Community gardens, often considered more inclusive and efficient sustainable land-use innovations in densifying cities, are frequently prioritized over traditional practices such as allotment gardening. This article uses Prague and Brno, Czechia’s two largest cities, as case studies to introduce the concept of the quiet right to the city, highlighting routine and inconspicuous ways of negotiating quiet sustainability in urban spaces.

Through qualitative content analysis, we explore how municipal actors, gardeners, and activists perceive community and allotment gardening. We compare these perceptions and practices across four dimensions that contribute to both urban sustainability and the right to the city: (1) public access to urban greenery and spatial justice, (2) community building and engagement, (3) food cultivation, and (4) environmental and climate protection.

We argue that worldwide community gardens tend to be preferred by local governments and planners due to their transitory and informal nature, which aligns more closely with capitalist urban agendas. In the Global East, efforts to emulate Western development by replacing traditional gardening practices with community gardens than undermine citizens’ right to the city, urban sustainability, and resilience against future challenges. Amplifying urban sustainability and allotment gardeners’ quiet right to the city requires addressing government biases, fostering alliances between allotment and community gardeners, and supporting initiatives that converge the two gardening practices.

As transformative visions for more just and sustainable societies multiply around the globe, the Diverse and Community Economies approach presents one of the most influential strategies to advance postcapitalist visions. In this paper, we contribute to this project based on our research and activism in the Global East, intended here as Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. We argue that engaging with the Global East is not only a matter of epistemic inclusivity but also a (too-often-neglected) opportunity to learn from a region with a history of dramatic economic transformation and diversity. We highlight examples of community economies already contributing to more-than-human wellbeing, and we present emerging theoretical insights concerning temporality, the multi-sitedness of the enterprise, and diverse economic subjectivities. With that, we articulate our ongoing research agenda and advance conversations with postcapitalist scholarship and politics.

Densely populated fringe areas located on the outskirts of large urban centres, such as garden zones, vinehills and resort areas, have emerged as focal points of spatial transformation in Central and Eastern Europe, including Hungary, following the political and economic transitions of the post-socialist era. These areas have become destinations for diverse and often contrasting migration processes, such as suburbanisation (even within city limits), economically driven migration, and employment-related mobility from remote rural areas to urban peripheries. These dynamics have led to pronounced social polarisation and fragmented land use changes, ranging from intensive urban development to landscape degradation.

Given the micro-level nature of these transformation processes, which often vary even within a single street, mapping such changes through statistical data and remote sensing poses significant challenges. To address these limitations, we complement traditional approaches with field data collection. However, conventional paper-based field surveys present numerous obstacles, including the coordination of team efforts, variability in survey design across study areas, and the conspicuous presence of surveyors in local settings. In addition, the high proportion of properties in these peripheral areas do not comply with legal standards, which underlines both the inconsistencies in urban planning and the growing social inequalities.

Our research methodology centres on mobile-based field data collection using the QField application. This approach enables the construction of a parcel-level database capable of accurately mapping the transformation of complex, mixed-use peri-urban areas. In this presentation, we will discuss the methodological features of our research and share our field experiences. Beyond the intended quantitative insights, the research has unexpectedly incorporated qualitative dimensions through interactions with residents in fringe areas.

This study is supported by the FK 146486 project (“An inexhaustible resource? Garden zones, vinehills and resort areas in the squeeze of urban development”), funded by the National Research, Development, and Innovation Fund within the framework of the FK_23 grant program.

In Turkey, as in many Mediterranean countries, the Covid-19 pandemic enhanced the mobility of the country’s affluent classes to coastal towns. Many decided to settle there permanently, either by making their second homes their main residences or by purchasing or renting new property. This has created severe social, infrastructural, and environmental problems in these towns because of transformed demographics, a largely unregulated construction boom, increased renovation activities, and an unprecedented rise in real estate and consumer goods prices.

This study focuses on two coastal/vacation towns in Turkey that have been subject to intense population flows from metropolitan areas during the Covid-19 period: Seferihisar (in İzmir province) and Datça (in Muğla province). We conducted field research in these districts and semi-structured interviews with the district mayors, administrative officials in the municipality, residents, neighborhood mukhtars, real estate agents, and contractors. We investigated the economic, social, administrative, spatial, and environmental impacts of urban to rural migration on the Seferihisar and Datça districts. In this presentation, we would like to share our data regarding societal conflicts particularly caused by the "misplaced" expectations of the newcomers. At the beginning of the research, we have an expectation that due to many problems caused by the increasing inflow of people, the local residents of these coastal towns may raise complaints about the new incoming population. However, the field study provides data that contradicts our initial assumptions. The newcomers seem to have a very selective perception of what "nature" provides them, and they seem to have a longing for a new, but slower version of an urban life in these coastal towns. Paradoxically, they also voice their complaints louder than the "native" residents about the rapidly transforming and "urbanizing" context of these small towns.

The lived experience and the transformative effects of urban-to-rural lifestyle migration are key research interests of rural studies, but we know little about what happens when urban dwellers make use of their local voting rights after relocating to rural areas. The paper presents insights from ethnographic explorations in a peripherialized rural region of Czechia in which social and spatial disadvantage intersect. Using an agency framework to bring the scholarship of lifestyle migration into a conversation with the literature on the transforming modes of political participation, the paper investigates how lifestyle migration affects the subjective perceptions and practical enactment of political agency of both lifestyle migrants and other rural residents. The findings show that lifestyle migration into rural peripheries widens the room to manoeuvre of the newcomers and highlights the role electoral tools play for the emergence of new formations of local citizenship. However, when lifestyle migrants emerge as political actors, this also triggers uncertainties, social distinctions and local power struggles. The contribution is intended to stimulate further conceptual work towards a nuanced understanding of the political realm of urban-to-rural lifestyle migration and points out promissing avenues for further research.

Within the framework of rural gentrification theory (Phillips, 1993; 2010; Phillips et. al. 2021) in “The role of gentrification in rural development” (FK-138098) research project the motivations, perceptions and impacts of urban to rural movers (rural gentrifiers) on their chosen settlement over four years was examined. It was found that many of the urban newcomers established small businesses in their chosen rural village, primarily in the tourism and hospitality sectors. Both academics and policymakers agree that boosting rural tourism can be an important escape route for charming rural settlements that have lost their agricultural role. On the basis of interviews with around 100 entrepreneurs (both indigenous and newcomer) in six research areas, the presentation will seek to answer the question: what exactly do the incomers/lifestyle entrepreneurs bring to the table, what material, cultural and social capital, knowledge and skills do they mobilise for the benefit of their business and the wider community, and to what extent can this contribute to the economic success of the local entrepreneurial community as a whole, could they contribute to the livelihoods and sustainability of the rural community or do the benefits accrue only to them? On the other hand, we have also seen that different socio-cultural backgrounds, values and attitudes sometimes lead to radically different visions of the development path and future desired by newcomers and indigenous local entrepreneurs. In this presentation I would also like to highlight where, along which value choices and attitudes, the greatest differences, even conflicts, exist.

The transition to sustainable living necessitates systemic knowledge-driven transformations that merge traditional, experiential, and scientific insights. This study explores the emergence of a social economy of knowledge within rural Europe, focusing on the case of lifestyle migrants at Cold Mountain Shelter in Hungary. These migrants have revitalized abandoned vineyards through innovative agro-ecological practices, bringing with them diverse resources such as knowledge, social capital, and financial investment. However, their journey illustrates the duality of such transformations: while they create value and resilience within rural areas, they also face significant challenges, including infrastructural inadequacies, policy misalignments, and limited community integration.
Drawing on workshops conducted with the Cold Mountain Shelter participants, the study examines how formal and informal knowledge systems interact in shaping rural sustainability. It highlights how lifestyle migrants act as agents of change, contributing not only to rural regeneration but also to the diffusion of transformative knowledge within and beyond their localities. The findings underscore the need for supportive governance and collaborative frameworks to address the challenges of rural gentrification while fostering synergies between newcomers and long-established communities.
By situating the experiences of Cold Mountain Shelter within broader discussions on ruralisation and the knowledge economy, this study provides valuable insights into the processes of rural transformation. It emphasizes the importance of creating inclusive knowledge networks that leverage the diverse resources brought by urban-to-rural migrants, offering actionable perspectives for policymakers and practitioners striving for sustainable rural development.

The phenomenon of depopulation and ageing, coupled with its accelerating pace in recent years, has livened up the debate around the ‘demographic winter’ (Blangiardo, 2024). This concept highlights the critical demographic challenges particularly facing Italy, where projections indicate an average age exceeding 50 years by 2080 and widespread depopulation in inner areas.

Depopulation is not merely a numerical decline but a multifaceted issue with profound and far-reaching consequences. The combination of low birth rates, ageing populations, and emigration undermines the demographic structure, leading to the obliteration of settlement heritage, loosening of social networks, and weakening of infrastructural and economic systems. Such challenges threaten not only the sustainability of these regions, but also their cultural and historical identity.

Two theoretical approaches have been proposed to address these challenges. The first, based on the concept of a ‘revenge’ of the so-called ‘places that don't matter’ (Rodriguez-Pose, 2018), calls for empowering local stakeholders to optimise their territorial development potential. This perspective emphasises the need for bottom-up solutions that mobilise local resources and communities. The second approach, the ‘place-based theory’ (Barca, 2019), warns against the dangers of a ‘local under-development trap,’ where local elites are partly responsible for hindering progress. It advocates a top-down external governance intervention to introduce new planning energies.

The mountainous inner areas of the Central Apennines, notably in the Abruzzo and Molise regions, exemplify these challenges. These regions have experienced a significant decline in demographic, cultural, and economic vitality, largely driven by emigration, also due to their proximity to coastal urbanised areas.

Only in recent years, tailored policies have been developed to counter the risk of disappearance of these small municipalities. These initiatives include financial incentives to attract new residents, refurbishment of housing stock, and enhancement of cultural and historical assets. By creating a welcoming environment, these measures aim to sustain and revitalise local communities.

The case of the Central Apennines underscores the urgent need for customised, multifaceted strategies to safeguard the identity and heritage of rural and mountainous inner areas.

Counterurbanization, understood as migration from cities to rural areas beyond the commuting hinterland, has been present in Western literature since the 1970s. However, in Central and Eastern Europe, internal migration patterns following the political and economic transformations of the late 1980s and early 1990s have been dominated by suburbanization and rural depopulation. Counterurbanization has been studied much less frequently, and its specific characteristics in the region remain largely unexplored.

In this context, a novel research question arises: does Central Europe experience counterurbanization with a delay resulting from its history of socialist urbanization and the emergence of market economy only in the 1990s? The talk is a presentation of the results of a quantitative study on the intensity and directions of migration from metropolitan areas to the peripheries in Poland between 1989 and 2023. It also situates counterurbanization within the broader context of other types of internal migration and key events in Poland's and Europe’s recent history, such as accession to the European Union and the COVID-19 pandemic. The research is based on an analysis of matrices of registered inter-municipal migrations - one of the largest and most detailed datasets of its kind in Europe. The interpretation of post-pandemic trends is further enriched by findings from a parallel qualitative study.

Starting from a new value system, in which the perceived quality of life is increasingly influenced by environmental factors in addition to economic ones, the contribution aims to understand how permanent migration and temporary movements are related to these factors in the contemporary Euro-Mediterranean space. Based on both theoretical considerations and empirical research, the first results of a survey carried out in the Italian Apennines are presented. Considering that "mobility involves a fragile entanglement of physical movement, representations and practices", we look for the manifestation of "constellations of mobility" as pervasive "patterns of movement, representations of movement and ways of practicing movement that make sense together" (Cresswell, 2010: 18).

The Euro-Mediterranean region has historically been characterised by migratory mobility, mainly from south to north, from small towns to large cities, from the interior to the coast, , and from the mountains to the plains. The question is whether the extensive mobility of people living in or coming from areas in demographic decline accelerates the loss of place-identity, or whether it encourages forms of place-attachment through multiple belonging that can represent added value in terms of social capital. We also ask whether this process may be a frictional element in the dynamics of abandonment.

The research is based on a mixed-method approach. In the first phase, twenty in-depth interviews allowed to capture the sense of living in the mountains today and to outline interpretative hypotheses, on the basis of which it was possible to construct a questionnaire and to obtain 150 semi-structured interviews. Indeed the spatial relations investigated include networks connecting metropolitan and peripheral areas. The results allow us to understand the factors that can condition decisions to leave or stay, forms of living and the activation of networks shaped by new lifestyles that have mobility as their fundamental character. For the Apennine mountains, the way in which mobility is conceived and practised is closely linked to the life choices of individuals who opt for a settled or multi-localised life. Choices that generate forms of community belonging in variable geometry that seem to define territorial identities and affective relationships with places.

Postmodernism has brought new hypermobile traveler segments alive that fluidly combine leisure with online remote work, valuing alternate capitals like nature, trust, compassion, innovation, culture, experiences and intellect. Consequently, it invokes a redefinition of the economic scaffolding for society and for tourism in today’s uncertain polycrisis environment. Our research focuses on digital nomads, conceptualized as archetypal hypermobile travelers forming a location-independent and technologically enabled lifestyle mobility.

In less than a decade, digital nomads moved from eccentrics to mainstream, challenging the traditional tourist push-pull motivation model being unsuited for characterizing and segmenting postmodern travelers routinely by demographic or class-based aspects. Hence this study seeks to establish a theoretical framework for segmenting postmodern travelers cross-referencing the findings from semi-structured in-depth interviews conducted with digital nomads with secondary literature review on the neo-tribe theory (Bennett 1999).

The neo-tribe theory was first introduced in the 1990s as an alternative to the concept of subculture in which individuals from different paths of life come together in fluid groupings, bound by common interests, similar lifestyles, and rituals. Drawing on our primary findings, our research aims to identify distinct segments within the hypermobile traveler group of digital nomads by examining their various life stages. Our study explores the similarities and differences of digital nomads in different lifecycle stages through a comparative analysis of intangible aspects, such as tribal symbols, rituals, and hubs, motivations for their lifestyle choices and unique travel and consumption patterns.

By employing the neo-tribe theory to map digital nomads by lifecycle stages, we hope to contribute to the understanding of these hypermobile travelers by exploring their specific motivational, consumption, and travel characteristics. Consequently, this research promotes inclusive tourism and supports the competitiveness of regions by developing attractive destinations for diverse groups of digital nomads and hypermobile traveler segments.
Bennett, A. (1999): Subcultures or Neo-Tribes?: Rethinking the Relationship Between Youth, Style and Musical Taste. Sociology. 33(3). pp. 599–617.

A substantial part of the population has gained new freedoms in where to locate themselves due to the rise of remote work and improved accessibility. This has fuelled in particular also lifestyle migration over greater distances as households perceive that some locations may better satisfy their needs. Given the greater freedom in locating, when intending to move, people increasingly consider a wider range of potential places than before, also including places and regions that they have not directly experienced before. This means that subjective perceptions of what those places offer are becoming more important.

The images we have of particular places and regions are formed through representations of those geographies in news and social media, television, films, books and art, or in conversations with the people surrounding us sharing their impressions. To reduce real world complexity that the human mind cannot grasp, such images of places and regions are by definition simplified, partial, incomplete and generalized, often building on stereotypes that tend to exaggerate certain distinctive features while neglecting others. First behavioural geography and later cognitive geography approaches have tried to find how mental images shape spatial behaviour, among which migration.

While these approaches so far predominantly focused on individuals, this contribution focuses on a more aggregate level. Employing natural language processing to capture sentiments embodied in news items reporting on Dutch places and regions over a 14-year period, we examine whether more positive attention given to places and regions makes these geographies more attractive as destinations for migration than places and regions that receive more negative reporting. We will also explore whether negative reporting has a stronger impact om migration than positive reporting, and whether there are spatial patterns in how places and regions are being portrayed, and how these have evolved over time. This paper integrates computational social science/digital geography approaches, cognitive geography and economic geography to shed a new light on migration dynamics.

Although the idea of traditional and static rural areas persists, globalization has increased mobility and enabled attachments beyond the living rural environment. Rural areas are transformed into an ‘arena’ of permanent changes, requiring more sensitive development strategies and approaches, including valorizing local values and assets. The recent study focuses on processes in rural areas by introducing staying as a new mobility concept or highlighting the mobility trend depicted by ‘newcomers’ as a highly diverse category. As Haartsen and Stockdale (2018) concluded, newcomers are migrants with a choice and purposeful decision to move into rural areas based on predefined goals and positive aspects of rural life, however with significant contribution to the quality of life and social and economic resilience of rural communities.

This paper is based on various findings from two-year research conducted in Serbia, focusing on people who stay or move into rural areas. It examines the extent of various movement types in rural areas and their impacts on economic activity, social and community engagement, and service provision. The research applies a place-based approach to understanding rural issues, intertwining local assets and local community perception of rural life. It encompasses seven municipalities in the Šumadija and West Serbia Region (NUTS2), which characterized similar topographical and rural issues, with certain vital impulses in rural areas toward demographical and economic sustainability. Settlements selection for case studies is based on comprehensive statistical analysis represented by the set of 22 indicators. An in-depth analysis is performed in 110 settlements by survey research, based on a standardized questionnaire, on the population aged 18-64 years. The in-person and drop-off-and-collect survey techniques were used on the sample of 2% of the total population in the selected settlements. The survey investigates the social, economic, and demographic features of the respondents, their satisfaction with the village attachment and quality of life, and their motives to stay. The newcomers’ attitude toward rural life, their intentions to stay, and the business and social novelties that they introduce to rural communities serve as meaningful guidelines for rural areas' transformation into resilient and sustainable environments.

Since the "mobility turn" (Hannam et al., 2006; Sheller and Urry, 2006), scholarly attention has increasingly focused on various forms of mobilities. However, this emphasis has often led to prioritizing movement, while immobility is frequently framed as a deficiency or lack of agency (Franquesa, 2011). Yet, there are certain instances where immobility should not be merely understood as a failure, an inability to move, or a lack of aspirasions. Decisions to stay can be shaped by complex, context-specific factors that merit closer examination, allowing for more nuanced interpretations (Jónsson, 2011; Marston et al., 2019; Mata-Codesal, 2015; Silva, 2024).

It is not always clear whether immobility stems from a voluntary decision or from external constraints. These situations can be understood in a more nuanced way through Bourdieu’s thoughts on the interplay between social and physical spaces, which illuminate how dispositions encoded in spatial habitus shape preferences for residential choices and (im)mobility. (Tomay and Berger, 2024).

The literature frequently highlights selective migration as a key feature of disadvantaged settlements with adverse socio-economic indicators. However, if the decline of the affected villages is associated with the outmigration of younger, better-educated, and more capable individuals, what does this suggest about those who stay behind? In this context, they are often portrayed as powerless individuals, incapable of change or action. This presentation seeks to challenge such reductionist interpretations by exploring the narratives of residents in a small village in the Ormánság region of Hungary, affected by outmigration, characterized by peripheral spatial position and inadequate transport infrastructure.

Our analysis is based on 29 semi-structured interviews and data recorded in fieldwork diaries. The findings reveal that in every case, respondents’ long-term decisions to stay in the studied settlement are shaped by a complex interplay of factors. Their relationship to their place of residence is influenced not only by the perception of constraints and disadvantages but also by the practical benefits they evaluate from their own perspective and the spatial dispositions embedded in their habitus. The reductionist view that attributes their immobility solely to a lack of agency fails to capture the multifaceted nature of their decision-making process.

References:

Franquesa J (2011) ‘We’ve lost our bearings’: Place, tourism, and the limits of the ‘mobility turn’. Antipode 43(4).

Hannam K, Sheller M and Urry J (2006) Editorial: Mobilities, immobilities and moorings. Mobilities 1(1).

Jónsson G (2011) Non-migrant, sedentary, immobile or ‘ left behind ’? Reflections on the absence of migration. The IMI Working Papers Series (April). Epub ahead of print 2011.

Marston G, Zhang J, Peterie M, et al. (2019) To move or not to move: mobility decision-making in the context of welfare conditionality and paid employment. Mobilities 14(5).

Mata-Codesal D (2015) Ways of Staying Put in Ecuador: Social and Embodied Experiences of Mobility–Immobility Interactions. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 41(14).

Sheller M and Urry J (2006) The new mobilities paradigm. Environment and Planning A 38(2).

Silva AV da (2024) Beyond the American dream: unveiling the complexity of young people’s (im)mobility in Governador Valadares, Brazil. Mobilities. Routledge. Epub ahead of print 2024.

Tomay K and Berger V (2024) Inclusion or Exclusion? The Spatial Habitus of Rural Gentrifiers. Social Inclusion 12.

This paper explores the impact of the COVID-19 health crisis on mobility patterns in small islands like El Hierro. The outbreak of SARS-CoV-2 brought about significant transformations in mobility at both global and local levels. The pandemic imposed restrictions on movement, altered daily travel habits, and triggered residential changes, with the unique insular characteristics of small islands playing a crucial role in these dynamics.

By analyzing statistical data on residential shifts (sourced from the National Statistical Institute) and qualitative insights obtained through in-depth interviews conducted as part of the RE-PLACE project, this study sheds light on the relationship between crises, remoteness, perceptions of safety, and human mobility.

However, it is essential to examine the transformative potential of crises and whether the mobility changes induced by the pandemic are temporary or lasting. This research adopts a diachronic perspective to differentiate between structural and circumstantial shifts. Key questions guiding the analysis include: Did the pandemic result in long-term changes in mobility on El Hierro? How was the island’s external appeal perceived by residents? Did local policies contribute to increased mobility to remote islands after the pandemic? Did the pandemic boost tourism development in El Hierro? Were mobility trends on El Hierro consistent with those observed in other small island contexts?

Answering these questions will enhance our understanding of the long-term effects of pandemic-driven mobility changes and highlight the opportunities or missed possibilities for island spaces like El Hierro.

Considering the current negative demographic trends in rural Latvia (Krisjane et al., 2017; Dahs et al., 2024), newcomers play an important role in restoring the composition of the population; newcomers are contributors of the demographic imbalance and the agents of change. Therefore, the attraction and retention of newcomers has the potential to ensure the sustainable development of rural areas.

Since there is a lack of research in Latvia that would focus on a deeper study of the integration of newcomers in rural areas, thereof the aim of the research is to explore what the integration process of newcomers in the rural areas is, to identify factors that promote or hinder the integration of newcomers in the rural area in Latvia. The integration process of newcomers in rural Latvia was analysed based on the social integration model four dimensions: structural, cultural, interactive and identification integration (Bosswick W., Heckman F., 2006).

The research data was collected using a qualitative social research approach – case studies in remote rural communities that included semi-structured individual and group interviews with newcomers, municipality representatives, and local activists, as well as published and unpublished materials from rural nongovernmental organizations.

The integration process in rural Latvia takes place through several elements: home, work, places and events, as well as society and various organizations. While there are many factors that contribute to the integration of newcomers in the rural areas, which are related with development of home in the rural area, different job opportunities, activities outside home and local community, there are also factors that can negatively affect newcomers’ future intentions to stay in the rural area. Among them are such factors as housing shortage, reluctance of local society to accept newcomers, concerns about school closures and unorganized infrastructure. In many places, opportunities for structural integration are gradually diminishing.

This study was supported by National Research Programme “Letonica for the development of Latvian and European society” Project No. VPP Letonika-2021/4-0002 “New solutions in the study of demographic and migration processes for the development of the Latvian and European knowledge society”.

The return of Brazilian migrants from Europe has gained increasing attention in recent years, particularly due to rising repatriation requests driven by unemployment, housing difficulties, and legal barriers. However, official records only capture cases registered through formal channels, failing to provide a comprehensive picture of returnees’ circumstances, degrees of (in)voluntariness, and waiting periods. Moreover, existing studies on transnational return migration largely focus on reintegration in Brazil, leaving a gap in understanding the obstacles, delays, and immobilities young Brazilian migrants encounter when attempting to return from the Global North.

While migration studies have traditionally emphasized movement, recent scholarship highlights the need to focus on immobility to rethink mobility and transnationalism. This study examines the complexities of return migration, moving beyond the voluntary/involuntary dichotomy to explore the constraints that shape (im)mobility. By adopting the "mixed migration paradigm," we analyse how young migrants reconcile their aspirations for return with the material, social, and legal resources available to them.

Based on ethnographic research conducted in Portugal, this paper develops the concept of homo emigraturus—migrants perpetually poised for movement—and examines how "geometries of power" shape their mobility constraints. The study investigates how power relations, social structures, and economic conditions create a persistent sense of limbo, where migrants are trapped between the desire to return and the inability to do so. This paradox generates deep frustration and reshapes their migratory experience, exposing the co-construction of mobility and immobility.

By centring immobility as an analytical framework, this study critiques the widespread association of migration with hypermobility and uninterrupted movement. It contributes to ongoing debates by foregrounding return mobility and the experiences of young migrants—two areas gaining prominence in both academic and policy arenas. Additionally, it examines dominant narratives surrounding mobility, movement, and flow through an immobility perspective, expanding discussions on return migration. Finally, it explores the tensions that shape contemporary youth mobilities amid global migration trends, uncertainty, and shifting socio-political landscapes, offering essential contributions to both policy and academic discourse.

The fragmentation of larger plastic debris into secondary microplastics is an escalating environmental challenge impacting ecosystems worldwide. The occurrence and pathways of this process within a given region are influenced by a combination of anthropogenic and environmental factors. Anthropogenic drivers shape the production and uncontrolled release of mismanaged plastic waste, along with its specific properties (e.g., polymer type, shape, size). In contrast, environmental factors govern the subsequent physical (e.g., mechanical fragmentation by wind or water) and biochemical (e.g., photooxidation) fragmentation of the plastic. Given the intricate interplay of these factors, encompassing both human-induced and natural characteristics of a region, plastic fragmentation presents itself as an ideal subject for comprehensive geographical research. As a guide for future investigations, we provide maps illustrating global patterns of mismanaged plastic waste emissions and the intensities of key physical and biochemical factors driving its fragmentation. Our analysis identifies hotspots of mismanaged plastic waste emissions, predominantly in South and Southeast Asia and the western part of South America. These hotspots are mapped as areas where high emissions of mismanaged plastic waste intersect with significant levels of UV radiation, strong winds, and flowing water. Our maps highlight coastal and riverine regions within these areas as hotspots where the interplay of biochemical and physical factors likely results in particularly high rates of plastic waste fragmentation. Additionally, we underscore the strong association of these hotspots with aquatic environments, which are especially susceptible to the widespread dispersion of secondary microplastics produced through this fragmentation process.

In recent decades, a series of socio-economic and ecological transformations have facilitated the return of large carnivores to areas where they had been previously extirpated. These rewilding processes, whether autonomous or human-driven, are often accompanied by increasingly conflictual relationships that undermine long-term coexistence and pose new challenges related to how to live with a presence that may be as uncomfortable as it is spectacular.

This presentation draws on ethnographic research in Trentino, Italy, to explore tracking as both a methodological tool and object of inquiry. In particular, it explores tracking as a multifaceted set of practices that underscores important aspects of the contemporary spatial and affective dimensions of human, bear and wolf cohabitation. Indeed, tracking is a privileged activity for investigating the interplay between space, power, technology, knowledge systems and more-than-human agencies in the context of conservation. As a scientific activity, tracking involves wildlife monitoring, data collection and mapping, with significant implications for biosecurity and conservation policies (O'Mahony, Corradini & Gazzola, 2018). Simultaneously is an affective embodied experience that engages the tracker with the multisensory and multispecies fabric of the landscapes (Morizot, 2021, Gandy, 2024). ‘To trace’ is above all to follow paths that connect visibility and invisibility, presence and absence. Traces and paths are the interweaving of multi-temporal lines of movements inscribed in the landscape that, once retraced, allow us to explore how landscapes are formed, transformed and inhabited by human and non-human beings (Ingold, 2010, Du Plessis, 2022).

The ethnographic involvement in tracking activities conducted both by field-scientists, citizen-scientists and unprofessional naturalists, unfolded the potential of tracking as a methodology for multispecies ethnography. In particular, three aspects of tracking practices are discussed: knowledge-making, landscaping, and metamorphosis. These dimensions highlight how tracking unsettle traditional binarism such as nature/artificial, human/nonhuman and science/local knowledge and opens up a space of possibility for rethinking coexistence as a multispecies relational achievement.

References
Du Plessis, Pierre

2022 Tracking meat of the sand: Noticing multispecies landscapes in the Kalahari. Environmental Humanities, 14(1), 49-70.

Gandy, Matthew

2024 Attentive Observation: Walking, Listening, Staying Put. Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 1-19.

Ingold, Tim

2000 The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. London and New York: routledge.

Ingold, Tim

2010 Footprints through the weather-world: walking, breathing, knowing. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 16: S121–S139.

Morizot, Baptiste

2020 Sulla pista animale. Nottetempo.

O’Mahony, Kieran, Corradini, Andrea, & Gazzola, Andrea

2018 Lupine becomings—tracking and assembling Romanian wolves through multi-sensory fieldwork. society & animals, 26(2), 107-129.

The contribution will bring empirical facts for a Geography of Sustainable Development (GSD) as a new discipline capable to offer sollutions for the challenges of the Anthropocene. We will emphasise three crucial elements of the GSD: 1. localization of SDGs, 2. use of Earth Observation methods and techinques for the measurement of sustainable development, 3. development of new data models based on AI for understanding the sustaunailbity transition. We use our latest empirical results form Eastern Europe and Central Asia to underline our argeuments for the GSD.