This article relates a conflict between customary landowners and the Ivorian state over the social housing site in Songon-Kassemblée, a peri-urban area in the District of Abidjan. Based on documentary research and field surveys, this study shows the preponderant role of customary landowners in negotiations related to land issues as well as the modification of the interplay of actors during the development process of this urban fringe.

Regions shape how people vote. This study analyzed elections across Europe to understand which parties thrive in which types of regions. Using cluster analysis, six region types were identified based on socioeconomic indicators. Radical-right parties perform strongest in disadvantaged and industrial regions, while conservative parties peak in industrial areas, and social-democratic parties are weakest there but strongest in rural regions. This study shows that place shapes party competition.

This intervention examines how socio-ecological transformation is contested within local governance. Drawing on ethnographic material from Zeitz (East Germany), it introduces anti-transformation as a mode of political practice in which legitimate administrative concerns are mobilized at decisive institutional moments. Rather than open rejection, resistance operates through procedures, timing, and institutional settings, reshaping political outcomes from within governance processes.

Right-wing parties are succeeding in redefining academic freedom and combating critical science. They mix up the principle of academic freedom with their idea of freedom of ideology. But researching uncomfortable truths about climate change and global inequalities are not ideological if they are fact checked. The defense of academic freedom by academic institutions is essential for dealing with global crises and injustices.

Public libraries in cities offer a variety of uses. They are places where people with different interests must explore and negotiate their being together. This paper focuses on the specific nature of this sociality. Based on two independent library research projects conducted in Bremen, Germany, and Vienna, Austria, we demonstrate how community emerges as an idea and a sense of togetherness from distributed care practices that revolve around a library etiquette.

The paper shows how a centuries-old traditional festival can stabilize people’s sense of security in a world marked by crisis. Based on qualitative research in rural Germany, we analyse how the Schäferlauf enables individuals to anchor their identities through embodied and place-based practices, including wearing traditional costumes and preparing the festival. We show that security is not only imagined or narrated but also something people do.

This study examines how the renewal of Blaha Lujza Square in Budapest changed everyday life in a busy public space. Using photos, interviews, observations, and online discussions, it explores what residents feel has been lost. Findings suggest social life has not disappeared but shifted toward faster, more temporary, and digitally mediated interactions, showing how renewal reshapes how people connect.

This article is about silence in French cemeteries. Cemeteries are often expected to be silent to allow for peaceful meditation, and local rules and regulations do show a well-established expectation for quietness. However, while historically expelled from the city’s limits, cemeteries have been increasingly integrated within the urban matrix and its noisier environment. This raises the question of the contemporary metropolis contempt for the dead and their spaces.

Why do some campaigns stop fossil fuel projects, while others fail? Using two conflicts of a power plant in Civitavecchia, Italy, we traced who worked with whom across protests, meetings, and legal and political actions in 2000–2010 and 2018–2023. Protest are not enough to stop these infrastructures; success came when activists built ties with unions, officials, and parties that could block permits and decisions, showing how broad alliances can speed energy choices: a deactivation network.

This article focuses on the experience of loss in urban spaces in late modernity, taking as a graphic example the construction of an urban highway and its consequences in a densely populated and geographically challenging area in western Germany. The article argues that the shift in social narratives during the transition from modern to late-modern society had a direct impact on the perception of loss caused by previously autocratic urban planning.

This article presents an edited transcript of a roundtable discussion on the ways in which a feminist perspective may help to better understand digital platform labour in Europe, current developments in feminist theorising on platform labour and new concerns arising for research and practice.

This paper investigates the National Protein Strategy (NPS) of the Netherlands, an important producer and global exporter of meat and dairy products that largely relies on the import of plant-based proteins from across the globe. The paper shows that the strategy is riddled with techno-optimist narratives that are promising to resolve the strategic deficit of proteins, sustaining the Dutch intensive livestock farming.