Study title

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.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...