Suchergebnisse

1. Introduction -- 2. From place attachment to wilderness : key concepts -- 3. Protected areas and national parks at the global scale: a critical survey -- 4. Obstacles, victims and opportunists : conceptualizing the relationship between local people and nature protection -- 5. Nature protection and municipal government during socialism and after : legacies, challenges and opportunities -- 6. From inflexible legislation to flexible governance : community participation and visitor-related challenges in pelister national park -- 7. Sumava : rewilding and its discontents -- 8. Conclusions.

Light – whether natural or artificial – plays multiple roles in the home: both as a material enabler of everyday life and as a device for exercising a variety of social relations. The post-2008 Greek economic crisis has endangered those roles by limiting people's ability to access or afford adequate energy services. This paper focuses on the enforced lack of illumination in the home, and the strategies and tactics undertaken by households to overcome this challenge. I connect illumination practices and discourses to the implementation of austerity, by arguing that the threat of darkness has become a tool for compelling vulnerable groups to pay their electricity bills. The evidence presented in the paper is based on two sets of interviews with 25 households (including a total of 55 adult members) living in and around Thessaloniki – Greece's second largest city, and one that has suffered severe economic consequences as a result of the crisis. I have established that the under-consumption of light is one of the most pronounced expressions of energy poverty, and as such endangers the ability to participate in the customs that define membership of society. But the emergence of activist-led amateur electricians and the symbolic and material mobilization of light for political purposes have also created multiple opportunities for resistance.

Light – whether natural or artificial – plays multiple roles in the home: both as a material enabler of everyday life and as a device for exercising a variety of social relations. The post-2008 Greek economic crisis has endangered those roles by limiting people's ability to access or afford adequate energy services. This paper focuses on the enforced lack of illumination in the home, and the strategies and tactics undertaken by households to overcome this challenge. I connect illumination practices and discourses to the implementation of austerity, by arguing that the threat of darkness has become a tool for compelling vulnerable groups to pay their electricity bills. The evidence presented in the paper is based on two sets of interviews with 25 households (including a total of 55 adult members) living in and around Thessaloniki – Greece's second largest city, and one that has suffered severe economic consequences as a result of the crisis. I have established that the under-consumption of light is one of the most pronounced expressions of energy poverty, and as such endangers the ability to participate in the customs that define membership of society. But the emergence of activist-led amateur electricians and the symbolic and material mobilization of light for political purposes have also created multiple opportunities for resistance.

Light – whether natural or artificial – plays multiple roles in the home: both as a material enabler of everyday life and as a device for exercising a variety of social relations. The post-2008 Greek economic crisis has endangered those roles by limiting people's ability to access or afford adequate energy services. This paper focuses on the enforced lack of illumination in the home, and the strategies and tactics undertaken by households to overcome this challenge. I connect illumination practices and discourses to the implementation of austerity, by arguing that the threat of darkness has become a tool for compelling vulnerable groups to pay their electricity bills. The evidence presented in the paper is based on two sets of interviews with 25 households (including a total of 55 adult members) living in and around Thessaloniki – Greece's second largest city, and one that has suffered severe economic consequences as a result of the crisis. I have established that the under-consumption of light is one of the most pronounced expressions of energy poverty, and as such endangers the ability to participate in the customs that define membership of society. But the emergence of activist-led amateur electricians and the symbolic and material mobilization of light for political purposes have also created multiple opportunities for resistance.

Although the political and economic strategies through which forests have become targets for the expansion and deepening of neoliberal agendas are relatively well researched, comparatively less is known about the reflections of such dynamics at the level of everyday life within communities and households. This is particularly true in the post-communist states of Southeastern Europe (SEE), which have seen the transformation of formerly centralized and hierarchical integrated monopolies in the management of forest resources into a myriad of diverse commercial enterprises outside the control of the state. With the aid of on-site research undertaken in Macedonia, therefore, this paper investigates the neoliberalization of the Balkan forestry sector within the context of illegal logging practices. The experiences and aspirations of individuals implicated in such activities are used as a basis for interrogating the privatization and marketization of forest resources, and the rise of corruption. The broader purpose of the paper is to explore the 'recombinant' (Stark, 1996) nature of capitalism in this part of the world, thanks to which neoliberalism is 'challenged and changed by its encounter with nature' (Duffy and Moore, 2010). © 2014 Elsevier Ltd.

Analysis of precarity has offered a critique of labour market experiences and politically induced conditions of work, housing, migration, or essential services. This paper develops an infrastructural politics of precarity by analysing energy as a critical sphere of social and ecological reproduction. We employ precarity to understand how gendered and racialised vulnerability to energy deprivation is induced through political processes. In turn, analysis of energy illustrates socio-material processes of precarity, produced and contested through infrastructure. Our argument is developed through scalar analysis of energy precarity in urban South Africa, a country that complicates a North-South framing of debates on both precarity and energy. We demonstrate how energy precarity can be reproduced or destabilised through: social and material relations of housing, tenure, labour and infrastructure; the formation of gendered and racialized energy subjects; and resistance and everyday practices. We conclude that analysis of infrastructure provides insights on how precarity is contested as a shared condition and on the prospect of systemic change through struggles over distribution and production.

In recent years, social housing providers in the UK have become influential actors in realising the national government's decarbonisation agenda. However, when decarbonisation is considered in light of austerity measures and privatisation of public housing, a number of contradictions arise. From interviews and a workshop with policymakers and registered providers in the city-region of Greater Manchester, three tensions are highlighted. First, since the 1980s, the housing stock condition has been used as a political pawn in successive reforms to demunicipalize social housing. Second, local authorities continue to harness the collectivities that remain in the social housing sector to realise their decarbonisation goals. Third, the retrofit practices of social landlords are only superficially aiming for carbon control, instead they focus on the social aims that are seen as important to the ethos and business model of the landlord. The paper concludes that there are unavoidable conflicts between the interests of different actors whose low carbon economy is conceived at different spatial scales and with different underlying objectives. As social landlords are foregrounded in sub-regional low carbon policy, they are effectively co-opted into market-based retrofit, resulting in unintended consequences for the social housing sector.

Introduction / Stefan Bouzarovski, Neil Simcock, Harriet Thomson, and Saska Petrova -- Energy poverty in an intersectional perspective : on multiple deprivation, discriminatory systems and the effects of policies / Katrin Grossmann and Antje Kahlheber -- Understanding energy poverty through the energy cultures framework / Fatima McKague, Rob Lawson, Michelle Scott, and Ben Wooliscroft -- Transcending the triad : political distrust, local cultural norms and reconceptualising the drivers of domestic energy poverty in the UK / Irena L.C. Connon -- Post-apartheid spatial inequalities and the built environment : drivers of energy vulnerability for the urban poor in South Africa / Abigail J. Knox, Jiska R. De Groot, and Nthabi Mohlakoana -- Water-energy nexus vulnerabilities in China : infrastructures, policies, practices / Alison Browne, Saska Petrova, and Beth Brockett -- Rethinking energy deprivation in Athens : a spatial approach / Evangelia Chatzikonstantinou and Fereniki Vatavali -- Location, location, location : what accounts for the regional variation of energy poverty in Poland? / Maciej Lis, Agata Miazga, and Katarzyna Salach -- Multiple vulnerabilities? : interrogating the spatial distribution of energy poverty measures in England / Caitlin Robinson, Stefan Bouzarovski, and Sarah Lindley -- The triple-hit effect of disability and energy poverty : a qualitative case study of painful sickle cell disease and cold homes / Anna Cronin de Chavez -- The value of experience : including young people in energy poverty research / Kimberley C. O'Sullivan, Helen Viggers, and Philippa Howden-Chapman -- Energy poverty in the western Balkans: adjusting policy responses to socio-economic drivers / Slavica Robic, Ivana Rogulj, and Branko Ancic -- Lighting up rural Kenya : lessons learnt from rural electrification programmes / Dorice Agol -- Urban energy poverty : South Africa's policy response to the challenge / Peta Wolpe and Yachika Reddy -- Conclusions / Neil Simcock, Harriet Thomson, Saska Petrova, and Stefan Bouzarovski -- Index

The discursive and representational aspects of the multiple political, economic and cultural challenges associated with low carbon urban transitions remain insufficiently explored in the academic literature. This is particularly true in the post-communist states of eastern and central Europe, which have been undergoing an additional transition of their own-from a centrally planned to a market-based economy. This paper, therefore, explores the manner in which climate change and sustainability narratives have been implicated in the development of 'satellite settlements'-a specific form of sprawl present in the Czech Republic. Much of the paper is focused on investigating the discursive framings of such areas by relevant state policies and the national media in this country. Several key themes and discursive shifts in the representation of satellite settlements have been detected. Such changes may be connected to wider interactions among the dynamics of post-communist and low-carbon urban transition. © 2013 Urban Studies Journal Limited.

The growing recognition of the importance of indoor environments as 'active political-ecological spaces' has rarely been followed up by a systematic empirical engagement with the constituent dynamics and conceptual issues associated with infrastructural deprivation in this domain, particularly in non-Western contexts. Therefore, we investigate the relationship between self-reported perceptions of thermal comfort in the home, on the one hand, and a range of sociodemographic, housing, and health-related variables, on the other, via a quantitative analysis of a large-scale survey undertaken in the Eastern Ukrainian town of Stakhanov. Using the perceived level of thermal comfort as a starting point for its empirical explorations, we estimate the number and type of households who feel that they are receiving inadequate energy services in the home. Special attention is paid to the role of buildings in shaping the perceptions of thermal comfort.© 2013 Pion and its licensors.

This chapter presents readers with an opportunity to engage with the concept of uncertainty through the lens of cities and urbanism. Operating within an environment of profound uncertainty relating to the future of humanity, contemporary cities present divergent narratives of hope and despair. They are chronically underfunded and over-burdened, home to deeply divided communities and decrepit infrastructure, and struggling with chaotic unplanned growth and chronic pollution. Yet they have the capacity to assemble social, material and technical actors and relations in novel, experimental and collaborative ways so as to respond to these emergent challenges. These insights lead us to the question, what can we learn from cities about living with, planning and governing uncertainty? The contributing authors answer this question by presenting five perspectives on urban uncertainties. Ranging from looking at the street level and ordinary uncertainty to looking at the governing of uncertain technological futures, to discussing the ethical outcomes of governmental solutions to climate change, the authors excavate the varying ways in which uncertainty stimulates experimental forms of urban development and governance, and with what social and political implications. They conclude with optimism: if a progressive, equitable and ethical socio-political milieu is fostered in cities, it is possible to effectively tackle urban challenges in uncertain cities.