The starting point of our research project is the following observation: that the increasing urgency to act on socio-ecological challenges, such as climate change, resource exhaustion, biodiversity loss, and questions of socio-ecological justice, coincides with an increasing distrust in established political responses to these challenges. We call this coincidence a socio-ecological dilemma.

Urban responses to socio-ecological challenges are commonly treated as possible ways out of the current socio-ecological dilemma.  In recent years, cities have been transformed into laboratories for more sustainable ways of life. Two urban approaches to socio-ecological challenges have become particularly prominent: the smart city- and the post-growth approach. Ideologically, the two responses are worlds apart. Smart cities tend to be "top down"-initiated and they endorse green growth. Post-growth initiatives (such as food co-ops, urban agriculture, repair cafés, or ecological housing initiatives), by contrast, tend to be bottom-up initiatives, critical of the capitalist growth-paradigm, and committed to alternative, resource-extensive ways of consuming and living.

Despite these differences, the two urban responses to the socio-ecological challenges – the smart city- and post-growth response – also share common denominators (denominators that tend to be overlooked in current scholarly discussions of them): both emphasize the importance of acting locally and experimentally. In other words, for both, the local level – more precisely, the level of everyday life – is the central "site" and the experiment (rather than the implementation of ready made solutions) the central form of intervention.

Against this backdrop, the central question of our FWF-funded research project, which is hosted at the Institute for Social Change and Sustainability (IGN, WU Vienna), is, to what extent acting locally and experimentally constitutes a promising alternative to established approaches to sustainability? More concretely, in our research we seek answers to the following questions:

• How can we make sense of the current trend towards acting locally and experimentally on global socio-ecological challenges?

• How do different initiatives understand the local and the experimental, including its role for changing unsustainable nature-society relations?

• What is the transformative potential and what are the limits of acting locally and experimentally on socio-ecological challenges?