Conference Agenda

Decarbonizing the building sector is a key priority in the European energy transition. To boost energy renovation rates and efforts to phase out fossil fuel-based heating systems, energy policy directives target especially the promotion of energy efficiency. However, prioritizing technology-oriented solutions for low-carbon energy and heating transitions raises a variety of intersectional issues, risking the exacerbation of energy and housing vulnerability. This presentation explores potential synergies and trade-offs between climate neutrality and social justice, advocating for deliberative democracy and participation in co-designing systemic perspectives for the social-ecological transformation towards low-carbon futures. We focus on the city of Innsbruck, where both rents and shares of installed fossil fuel-based heating systems are among the highest in Austria. Our research follows a transdisciplinary approach, highlighting the potential of participatory systems mapping with citizens in a deliberation panel setting. We identify several structural key conditions that increase exposure to housing and energy vulnerability in Innsbruck, particularly among tenants and low-income households. From a systemic perspective, we show how sharply rising rent and energy costs not only affect the disposable household income, but also reinforce dynamics that develop within the relationship between income, stress, renunciation, and mental health. Furthermore, we reflect on the potential of co-designing socially just policy interventions, but also on the challenges of transdisciplinary collaborations between researchers, citizens, and policymakers we have experienced.

Citizen engagement in climate adaptation is gaining traction, with an increasing number of cities resorting to the co-production of adaptation. This approach extends beyond collaborative planning, as individual citizens and the private sector are tasked with implementing flood-proof measures, which include Nature-Based Solutions, on their premises to improve overall soil permeability. Consequently, adaptation becomes a shared responsibility of all urban actors.

While community-based adaptation has the potential to address the limitations of top-down planning, by incorporating local knowledge and context-specific solutions, this responsibility shift in the provision of flood security can have severe implications for climate justice. If a city's flood security depends on citizens' action, how can policymakers ensure everyone is equally protected from flooding, thus preventing green enclaves? How can adaptation plans which rely on property-level measures prevent green gentrification?

The extent to which co-produced adaptation can contribute to climate (in)justice deserves further scrutiny. In particular, the literature is yet to address how the different actors involved in co-production (local governments, private businesses, and individual residents) frame climate justice and responsibility for flood adaptation. How do these actors think about just adaptation determines their actions and the responsibility they take in the co-production of flood adaptation.

To address this gap, this research employs a Q-Methodology study to map perceptions of stakeholders involved in the Amsterdam Rainproof programme. Amsterdam Rainproof is a leading example of participatory flood adaptation in a city facing increasing pluvial flood risk. The Q-study explores the priorities and narratives around climate justice of public and private stakeholders carrying the responsibility of adaptation within the programme.

The Q-study will produce a narrative landscape of Amsterdam Rainproof, which will identify the predominant narratives around climate justice and responsibility for flood adaptation in Amsterdam. It will also highlight areas of consensus and dissensus between the different positions, which can serve as entry points to navigate conflict in participatory greening programmes.

The meaning of (urban) space is undergoing constant renegotiation, it is reproduced in everyday actions and in political discourse. Urban activists advocate for a more just distribution of physical urban space away from motorised traffic towards sustainable, human-scale cities. Most activists act on their own behalf, as concerned or affected residents; others choose to perform specific roles, for instance, as topic experts. Some initiatives select their spokespeople by expected perception, e.g., to avoid media bias such as ‘bikelash’, but not all do. Virtually always, roles are far from simple, they are multi-layered and complex.
In an ongoing study, I investigate which roles urban activists perform, how they choose a role, and which motives influence the choice. I ask whether activists’ performativity can shift the political landscape in their favour, and how performed roles are perceived by politicians, lobby groups, and the public. I am interested in the influence of situational, cultural, and political settings; specifically, whether urban activists perform different roles online and offline, in societies trusting in experts and in more populist societies, and in the Global North and in the majority world. To that avail, I employ a mixed-method approach that combines innovative quantitative methods from computational linguistics and social network analysis, and state-of-the-art qualitative methods from visual anthropology, digital ethnography, and digital anthropology.
In this presentation, first, I present preliminary results from a quantitative social media analysis and first insights gained from interviews and in participant observation embedded in a cycling advocacy group. Guided by exemplary discourses, I then sketch an early theoretisation of the observed, primarily based on the concepts of Performativity and Symbolic Interactionism. Simultaneously, I open up a (self-)critical discussion on the appropriateness of dialectically separating the multitude of roles in which virtually all actors involved in urban conflicts find themselves.

Within the liquid, fragmented and atomised society that characterises the post-modern era, the need to expand the relevance and centrality of care practices emerges strongly.

This push, originating within the transfeminist movement and spread through the manuscript "The Care Manifesto: The Politics of Interdependence", aims to question the social and cultural organisation based on the capitalist, neoliberal and patriarchal system.

Amongst the various fields where this conflict between different systemic models unfolds there is certainly that of social and health services, an essential element of welfare and public space policies. In the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic, the obvious limitations and difficulties of the Italian healthcare system in tackling and managing the spread of infections have demonstrated the need for a paradigm shift in care processes. This change has partly also been incorporated into governance policies, and within the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNRR) that characterised post-pandemic public action. Specifically, Mission 6c1 was included with the aim of orienting the National Health Service towards the principles of proximity and community participation. Despite the good intentions of these policies, limitations and contradictions persist in the concrete deployment of new care practices.

If, on the one hand, sociomedical institutions tend to include in their governance processes forms of participation and community empowerment, on the other hand, this apparent openness does not seem to be followed by concrete measures capable of bringing about a structural change in care processes. In Italy, in fact, in recent years, the increased funding allocated to private healthcare, due to progressive deregulation and privatisation, are not only preventing the emergence of a new model of care, but have also compromised the functioning itself of public healthcare, increasing inequalities in the distribution, quality and accessibility of healthcare services.

Through the analysis of Mission 6c1 of the PNRR and of the ‘Sentieri Metropolitani’ (Metropolitan Paths) project, conducted by the Local Health Authority in Rome in collaboration with the Italian Geographic Society, we intend to show the limits and potentials of new participatory processes promoted in the italian socio-health field.