At this year’s Annual Conference of the Royal Geographical Society (RGS-IBG) in London, our Team A1 “Structural Change & Participation” lead a panel titled “Entanglements of Change: More-Than-Representational and Practice-Based Approaches to the Spatialities of Socio-Ecological Transformation”.
The panel focused on the question of how socio-ecological transformations towards a more sustainable and post-fossil-fuel future are experienced and negotiated at a local level, as well as in the context
of everyday practices and conflicts: not as linearly planned processes, but as contradictory changes embedded in spatially complex contexts. From a practice-oriented and ‘more-than-representational’ perspective, the panel examined how transformation is lived out through practices, relationships, emotions and in the interplay between people, objects and environments. Change takes place in different spatial contexts, is historically shaped and unevenly distributed socially. Of interest are the tensions and uncertainties that arise in the process, but also new forms of collaboration and alternative visions of the future.
The panel’s contributions explored this perspective through various case studies:
- A presentation by Hanbit Chang (Eindhoven University of Technology) examined sustainable urban logistics in the Netherlands from the perspective of workers who, through everyday practices and improvisation, are putting climate-related reforms into practice.
- Ramona Frank (independent researcher) used the example of a community-supported agriculture project in Germany to illustrate how transformation arises from the interplay between people, plants and the environment, and how it can be experienced through the senses.
- Another paper by Tarmo Pikner and Saara Mildeberg (Tallinn University) demonstrated how, in Estonia (Narva and Sillamäe), alternative forms of resource-conserving living are being developed through everyday practices of gardening, repairing and self-sufficiency.
- A study by Gustav Nielsen (University of Luxembourg) from Luxembourg examined new forms of democratic participation in transformation processes and explored how different participatory spaces – from citizens’ assemblies to local initiatives – interact with one another.
Taken together, the contributions made it clear that transformation is always embedded in specific places and lived realities, and must be understood and shaped within that context.
In concrete terms, this means the following for our research: looking at Estonia, for example, shows that residents of post-socialist industrial towns elsewhere, too, are developing their own informal ways of coping with economic uncertainty through everyday practices such as gardening, repairing things and providing for themselves.
It was also striking how similar the underlying tensions are across very different contexts: there appears to be a gap everywhere between top-down planned transformation processes and the everyday, often informal practices through which local people respond to change – whether in Dutch logistics centres, industrial towns in eastern Estonia or, indeed, in the Central German mining region. This reinforces our commitment to taking precisely this everyday, practical level seriously in our own research.
In this regard, the visit to London provided us with numerous international insights and perspectives that are relevant to our investigations into and active shaping of social change in the Central German region.