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 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).

Data was collected through i) semi-structured interviews with practitioners of urban gardening and/or zimnina making in the city of Sofia; and elites, including urban planners and national and municipal level policy-makers and utility providers for energy, water, food/agriculture and environmental protection; ii) participatory observations of urban gardening and making zimnina. Interviewees were selected out of group of urban gardeners in Sofia who used their produce to make zimnina. The former group of participants involved a mix of vulnerable practitioners (mainly pensioners and people on low income) and practitioners who were driven by the life-style benefits of the practices (quality of food, recreation, health and wellbeing benefits). Participants in the elite interviews were selected because of their involvement in the systems of provisioning of food, water and energy, and environmental protection at the national and urban level. Snowballing was used to recruit practitioners for urban gardening and zimnina making. Most practitioners were interviewed in both relation to zimnina making and urban gardening, and observed in multiple locations: their homes, gardens and locations for zimnina preparation and making.