Environmental sociology is a central sub-field in sociology, because the environment - including the landscape - is a determining factor in human and societal life, and because functional ecosystems, reduction of environmental strain, and opportunities to experience nature are central societal goods. Add to this the fact that environmental sociology forms a significant theoretical and empirical field in contemporary sociological research, including the development of a sociological understanding of risk, the revitalization of practice theory, and a renewed eye for the role of materiality in societal dynamics. Environmental sociology has obvious points of contact with other sub-fields in sociology, including sociology of consumption, food sociology, urban sociology, sociology of technology and science, and risk sociology; as well as other subjects such as media sociology, sociology of education, and political sociology, as the handling of environmental problems is mediated through communicative, pedagogical, and political processes. We hereby invite anybody with an interest in reflections on environmental sociology to present their research, and we look forward to good discussions in and around the contact areas of environmental sociology.

Over the past 20 years, urban sustainability has emerged as a key objective among city planners world-wide, tied to growing concerns with the ecological consequences of urban life; concerns that are presently intensified by long-term climate change risk scenarios. While urban studies has gradually started to pay attention to the massive challenges of energy and transport infrastructures implied in visions of sustainable cities, most approaches remain tied to a Marxist political economy insensitive to STS notions of the contingencies of socio-technical design processes. In this paper, I sketch an alternative theoretical approach to ‘urban green assemblages’, inspired by recent attempts to bring actor-network theory (ANT) –and wider STS concepts – to bear on urban studies. ANT, I argue, ultimately offers a new ontology for the city, allowing for the study of the concrete and plural sites at which urban sustainability is known, practiced, re-scaled, negotiated and contested, in heterogeneous and dynamic assemblages of humans and non-humans. I illustrate the analytical potentials of this ANT urban ontology by drawing on on-going comparative case studies, using multi-sited ethnographic methods, into future-oriented sustainable city building projects in Copenhagen (Denmark), Kyoto (Japan) and Surat (India).

This paper investigates how urban greenspace is integrated in everyday practices of urban populations. What are the social functions that green areas serve, and how do people interact with the materiality of urban greenspace - its bio-physical structures and its nature and landscape. The paper reports from a recent empirical study in the city of Copenhagen, Denmark, and it seeks to unfold and qualify concepts of lifestyle and practice, i.e. concepts by which sociological studies can capture and understand patterns of actions in people's daily lives and life courses. Particularly it seeks to include an understanding of the role of materiality in the analyses of social practices. Inspired by actor-network theory the paper proposes to analyse the role of urban greenspace in everyday practices as actant functions performed by the greenspace and its elements. A number of studies show that urban green areas are beneficial for human health. These studies do, however, not go into a broader understanding of the social significance of urban greenspace and its significance in people's lives. The social functions of urban green areas are not limited to whatever good effects they have on public health. The question is also which roles green areas play in people's lives and in the community. The study presented in this paper shows that urban green areas are included in everyday life as spaces for free time and for household flexibility. They serve a number of different social functions by providing spaces for solitude, for being together with close friends and relatives and for the experience of civic diversity. And the possibility of having experiences of nature and landscape become an integral part of urban life.

There is a substantial potential of saving energy through energy renovation of existing building stock of single family detached houses. Energy renovation projects are often framed in terms of overcoming technical problems and optimizing technical and economic performance of houses, however the successfulness of energy renovation projects (in terms of saving energy) often is conditioned by the compatibility with daily life practices of user families. So the question here is whether and how renovation projects are designed and organized, in order to create a socio-technical framework accommodating environmentally preferred behavior and sustainable practices, while making it the most logical and easy choice for families involved?

The theoretic framework of the study will be founded on the crossroads of The Theory of Practice and Science and Technology Studies. In order to study the emergence of new socio-technical systems of sustainable housing, the mapping of key actors, structures and processes are undertaken, with the special attention to their interrelatedness and co-evolution. Empirical material includes cases of renovation projects, background material on planning and design processes and interviews with main stake holders, participant observation and document study.

Governments and utility companies have developed a great deal of strategies and plans on how to cope with energy saving in households, since this represents a major issue for climate change remediation. Many of these governance initiatives tend to re-produce the idea of technical potentials, and have difficulties in coping with the challenge of establishing a social context for embedding energy saving actions in local households

Our aim in this paper is to explore how energy strategies and plans may be anchored in the social context of local households. This is especially relevant in an urban planning context, since we are experiencing a wave of new types of initiatives in Denmark, where local authorities launch and facilitate local processes of transition towards energy savings. These initiatives are characterized by explicitly focusing on establishing a social context for embedding energy saving actions in local households; thus producing new planning practices that appreciate the social challenge, rather than re-producing the idea of technology transfer. These cases of local planning initiatives provide an interesting context to explore successful intersections between energy planning practices and household practices.

The theoretical contribution of the paper is to bridge between household and energy planning practices. This bridging is based on the conceptualisation of the house as the stage of household practices (the social context), on the one hand, and the stage of planning and carrying out energy saving action initiatives (strategies and plans), on the other hand. The paper explores how these practices encounter in exemplary local processes of learning-by-trying to implement energy saving solutions in households, and provides important clues about the potentiality to anchor energy strategies and plans in the social context of local households.