Abstract. Geological disposal projects rest on the assumption that radioactive waste can be safely managed through its spatio-temporal separation from human life at the surface. This paper examines how a local farmer in the Zürcher Weinland – one of the regions considered for nuclear waste disposal – disrupted this assumption by rendering the radioactive hazard perceptible through a series of landscape interventions. Drawing on interviews, participatory observations, and document analysis, we show how these interventions – banners, barrels, and, most notably, a 30 t protest boulder, the menhir – provoked controversy over humanity's relationship with radioactive waste and its implications for the continuation of rural life. In dialogue with Jacques Rancière's work on aesthetics and politics, we argue that these interventions can unsettle the region's consensual political landscape and reveal how human and non-human actors can emerge as political subjects.

Abstract. Under the pressures of global capitalism, cities are increasingly losing their “urbanity” – understood as the combination of social and spatial qualities that enable large numbers of individuals to coexist, collaborate, and thrive. This article explores how self-managed socio-cultural places (SMPs) in Rome counteract this process by fostering collaboration, offering essential services, and reimagining social relations. Drawing on empirical research conducted between 2017 and 2022, I argue that SMPs – though imperfect and often facing crises – function as sites where urbanity is actively produced from the margins. By occupying abandoned or neglected spaces, these initiatives contribute to their neighbourhoods' vitality and challenge dominant models of urban development. Focusing on the evolution of SMPs, their key features, and their contradictions, this paper show how these practices can inspire alternative ways of conceiving and living in the city. Finally, I interrogate the very concept of urbanity itself, proposing that these grassroots efforts offer valuable insights into resisting disurbanity and fostering more inclusive urban futures.

Abstract. Based on examples taken from Switzerland, the paper offers an exploratory analysis of how the fight against COVID affected the societal relevance of the air, in its (1) elemental, (2) embodied, (3) affective, (4) socio-technical and (5) power-related dimensions. Together, these levels highlight the fact that the fight against COVID-19 increased the air's relevance as a focal point of societal concern and judgement and of competition and dispute, which in turn produced novel ways of ordering the air through legally, practically and materially defined geometries, internal structures, and contours. As the paper shows, these geometries of the air were and still are socio-politically produced in highly unequal ways. To date, they remain inherently pluralistic and as such fundamentally conflictual. The aerial legacies of COVID-19 are invested by various power relations that need critical attention. Over 150 years ago, the risks of waterborne diseases such as Cholera were tamed by the public provision of clean water. We argue that similar efforts are warranted to provide clean indoor air for all by removing the threats posed by airborne diseases such as COVID-19, influenza and tuberculosis … Our panel of scientific experts strongly recommends that the clean air needs of offices, schools, theaters, public buildings, and mass transportation systems be assessed and that measures be taken to ensure clean air in all indoor environments. (Expert group “Pandemic-proof buildings”, 2022:3) The preceding quote underscores the centrality of the issue of the air in the legacies of the fight against COVID-19. Aiming to perpetuate the lessons learnt from the respiratory disease, the quoted white paper asks for the development and implementation of a wide range of novel and/or improved air-related technological solutions whilst also suggesting, on a more general level, the establishment in Switzerland of a National Research Programme on “Clean air for pandemic-proof buildings” and the creation of an “Indoor air competence center” (Expert group “Pandemic-proof buildings”, 2022:4). The emerging post-pandemic policy agenda resonates with many other media-reported claims for long-term improvements of the indoor air quality in schools (Direction de la formation et des affaires culturelles, 2022; Eykelbosh, 2022), factories (Wirth, 2021), hospitals (Bourban, 2022) or trains (Monay, 2022). Also think of the ongoing debates about the wearing of face masks on public transport and other spaces of togetherness and micro-movements (Zhang and Zhai, 2022), and consider the discussions about the future usefulness of the materials deployed and lessons learnt from the access-control and social-distancing measures that created a patchwork of more or less hermetically enclosed and internally redesigned “bubbles of shared breathing” through which and in which movement was allowed to happen during the COVID years (Jubin, 2022; Lee and Eom, 2023). These examples reiterate the aerial sensitivity that remains from the fight against COVID-19. Thus if we are to understand and question the legacies of the fight against COVID-19, such is my basic argument, the question of the air must be placed centre stage. More specifically, based on examples taken from Switzerland, the paper offers an exploratory analysis of how the fight against COVID affected the societal relevance of the air, in its (1) elemental, (2) embodied, (3) affective, (4) socio-technical and (5) power-related dimensions. Together, these levels highlight that the fight against COVID-19 increased the air's relevance as a focal point of societal concern and judgement and of competition and dispute, which in turn produced novel ways of ordering the air through legally, practically and materially defined geometries, internal structures, and contours. As the paper shows, these geometries of the air were and still are socio-politically produced in highly unequal ways. To date, they remain inherently pluralistic and as such fundamentally conflictual. The aerial legacies of COVID-19 are invested by various power relations that need critical attention.

Abstract. The article examines the current German heat transition as a central conflict about socio-ecological transformation. It analyzes the struggles on the decarbonization of the mainly fossil-based heat production and supply on different scales perceiving them as conflicts about the hegemonic regulation of society-nature-relations. Using a historical materialist policy-analysis as an operationalization of marxist political ecology and state theory the author discusses the neoliberalization of nature and the multiple crisis as a context in which four hegemony projects emerged. The actors of these projects that are based in a specific political economy try to achieve their long-term strategies in the current political disputes on how to decarbonize the heat supply in German cities. These debates are further examined on the municipal scale taking the case of Berlin as an example. The analysis shows that those processes crystallize in the question whether the corporate gas-based infrastructure will be adjusted by means of green gases resp. hydrogen or whether it will be transformed to a new system based on renewable energies resp. heatpumps.

In this editorial, we sketch out an agenda committed to exploring and fostering situated yet global perspectives on the manifold connections, disconnections, and differences within Europe, as well as between Europe and other parts of the world and discuss how we seek to advance this agenda and some of the continuing practical hurdles we face.

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