Photographic Data of Urban Gardening and Making Zimnina in Sofia, 2017-2018

The project was designed with societal, policy and research impact in mind. The target audiences of the project included local authorities, the urban poor and other practitioners (such as engineers and NGOs) and researchers. Societally, the primary beneficiaries of the project are expected to be urban practitioners (policy-makers/planners, engineers/designers, service providers, NGOs, and poor end-users).
This photographic data on urban gardening and making zimnina in Sofia, Bulgaria collected from June 2017 until March 2018.<p>Cities are complex networked spaces where multiple interdependent socio-economic, technoscientific
and environmental activities are concentrated. Due to rural-urban migration and climate
change, augmented by other pressures (e.g. from ‘global’ markets), provisioning of many basic
services and commodities such as food, water and energy requires constant adaptation and reform.
This adaptation/reform is necessary to build resilience, to address vulnerabilities and to guarantee
equitable access. However, the focus on creating ‘resilient urban systems’ in policy circles breeds a
disjuncture between resilience approaches/efforts and the production (and experience) of
vulnerabilities on the ground (see section 12). This disjuncture is compounded by two sets of critical
challenges.
First, as highlighted by the intellectual and political movement on environmental (in)justices
(Agyeman et al. 2002; Sundberg 2008; Walker 2009; Carmin and Agyeman 2011), vulnerabilities and
access to key services are unevenly distributed among city dwellers. Vulnerability, understood as ‘the
inability of an individual or group to cope with adversities’, is experienced by the urban poor more
acutely than other social classes (Wisner et al. 2004; Hogan and Marandola 2005; Douglas et al. 2008;
Anguelovski and Roberts 2011). Both poverty and vulnerability may be exacerbated by the unequal
provisioning of key services.
Second, the material flows and infrastructures involved in provisioning basic services are
deeply interdependent. This interdependence has recently gained considerable international policy
attention under the rubric of the ‘Nexus’ of food, water, energy and the environment/climate
(Martin-Nagle et al. 2012; Dodds and Bartram 2014; Allouche et al. 2014; Wilsdon and Cairns 2014).
Associated with the Nexus are, a) trade-offs such as those encountered in water use for provisioning
bio-energy instead of food; b) aggravations when one sector’s problems (such as water pollution)
impair others (e.g. food provision); and c) synergies that arise, for example, when removing a barrier
to energy access streamlines flows of food and/or water. The trade-offs and aggravations of the
urban Nexus pose challenges that cut across spatial scales as well as across sectors and silos in
existing research and governance organizations.
The two sets of challenges are most seriously encountered in the form of the ‘nexus of
(uneven) vulnerabilities’ (Stirling 2014). It is at this nexus that vulnerability to water contamination
may be exacerbated by vulnerability to hunger and lack of access to energy. And it is here that any
new vulnerabilities engendered by a social, technological or ecological ‘event’ interact with existing
forms of insecurity and injustice. For instance, squatters cultivating a peri-urban riverbed for their
own food provision may be most directly affected by cyclical flooding (Marshall et al. 2009; Baviskar
2011).
The first objective of this project is to map the nexus of uneven vulnerabilities in-the-making
in three highly-dynamic cities in East Africa, Brazil and Europe, driven by the research question:
How are urban vulnerabilities co-constituted with trade-offs and aggravations at the food, water, energy and the environment Nexus?
The second objective is to use the dynamic maps of vulnerabilities to inform resilience-building
efforts led by public policy and other practitioners, asking:
How can urban governance exploit synergies of the urban Nexus and reconfigure the
trade-offs, in practice, toward greater equity and resilience?
To meet these objectives, we examine interdependent practices of provisioning food, water and energy by
suppliers of services, maintenance workers, engineers/designers, planners, policymakers and,
perhaps most centrally, end-users themselves. Each practitioner’s actions are made possible by
associated actors and technologies, which together constitute a practice (Shove et al. 2007; Arora et
al. 2013). A practice is continually readjusted as its surroundings change, which makes it apt for
examining the dynamic situations encountered in rapidly urbanizing areas.
Interdependent practices of provision at the urban Nexus are usefully approached using the
notion of ecology of practices (Stengers 2005). The notion directs attention to junctures at which
practices of users meet those of planners and service providers, and highlights the changing nature
of (mis)alignment between practices over time and space. Building novel theoretical frameworks
around this notion, we aim to produce dynamic vulnerability mappings that reveal unequal power
relations within and between formal and informal networks, while facilitating an understanding of
how practitioners can work across spatial and disciplinary boundaries to address vulnerabilities. The
proposed approach potentially addresses an important governance challenge for policymakers and
urban planners: How can they (re)design their practices and interventions to (i) open up pathways
for other practitioners to (re)configure their practices toward greater equity and resilience (Thapa et
al. 2010; Stirling 2008), and (ii) ensure that actors in power do not disqualify and lock out practices
of the vulnerable (Di Chiro 2011; White and Stirling 2013; MacKinnon and Derickson 2013).</p>