The article highlights the need to rethink and reconceptualise the accepted concepts of smart cities and villages by shifting the attention from technology and technological solutions and moving it towards understanding the significance of communities and sustainability. The conceptual framework combines four essential features—community, village, city and sustainability—and analyses the links and relationships between them. A new community-centred approach to development is suggested in order to emphasise that sustainable living cannot be achieved only through technological solutions. Instead, we suggest that to ensure social sustainability, appropriation, and effectiveness of new solutions in the long term, the process has to start, be adapted and led by people and their needs. In this light, the article analyses three dimensions of smart living—energy, mobility, waste—through the prism of rural–urban linkages and the role of ICT. Core principles and recommendations (calm technology, community size, identification of community leaders, surveillance and control issues, community building) for designers of ICT solutions and developmental projects in smart cities and villages are presented. These principles take into account people and communities and combine findings of engineering and social sciences, especially anthropology, psychology, and sociology.

The study presented in this article focuses on the role of a smart waste bin (waste container) designed for waste management and explores what types of interventions people consider more appropriate in promoting environmentally responsible behaviour—based on norms or on an individual’s emotions. The smart waste bin development process was people-centred and paid particular attention to human experiences, allowing for various interaction modalities. By incorporating various sensors for waste volume and weight measurement in conjunction with presence and user identification capabilities, the experience was personalised. User feedback was collected by an extensive survey, consisting of four systematic sections, where values, attitudes, norms, perceived behavioural control, behavioural intention and actual behaviour were examined. The survey was completed by 194 respondents. The results showed that participants at the declarative level show a high level of environmental awareness and are very much willing to handle waste appropriately. Additionally, the results of the R&D process indicated that relatively cheap and efficient technological solutions can be developed to support waste management and sustainable lifestyles if the human-centred approach is taken into account.

The article presents the state of applied anthropology in Europe, in particular focusing on the application of anthropological knowledge and skills within the private sector. Firstly, the text depicts the historical context, which has had a strong and often negative impact on the developments in contemporary applied anthropology and specifically on applying anthropology in for-profit endeavours. It then provides an overview of this type of applied anthropology in Europe by identifying its main institutions and individuals. Building on this analysis, the article elaborates on extant challenges for its future development, and outlines the most promising solutions. The authors conclude that it is of crucial importance for European anthropology to make the transition ‘from words to actions’, especially in the areas not traditionally addressed by anthropologists, such as business and design anthropology or consultancy work in the private sector. While the discipline has a longer applied history in areas such as development, human rights and multiculturalism, few anthropologists have played significant roles in the efforts usually associated with the private sector. It is argued that anthropology should – also outside the non-profit and non-governmental sectors – shift from being a descriptive, hermeneutical and interpretative branch of social sciences describing and explaining the past or commenting on the present, to an applied discipline intervening in shaping the future.

In recent years, food waste has become an important issue that attracts attention from scientists, consumers, and activists. According to the World Bank, one third of food produced for human consumption is wasted. In Slovenia, almost 131,800 tons of food waste were generated in 2017, or 64 kg per person on average. This article presents the findings of a study on household food waste in Slovenia and, more specifically, its capital, Ljubljana. The authors studied food waste management using a combination of quantitative and qualitative approaches (i.e., a survey and an ethnographic study). These approaches were combined in order to obtain a broader picture of waste management and explain how, when, and why people “transform” food into waste.

This article presents opportunities for enriching anthropological knowledge and methods with machine learning and data analysis. Different examples show how quantitative methods empower anthropologists and how computational methods supplement ethnography, from sensor data and interview transcripts to designing technology solutions and automatically labeling cultural heritage. Conversely, the authors discuss the benefits of qualitative approaches in contemporary anthropological research and show how to transition from data analysis to ethnography and vice versa. Finally, the article pinpoints aspects in which each method can fail individually. It discusses why a combination of the two approaches, called circular mixed methods, minimizes the chance of failure and maximizes insights from the data.

This article focuses on experiences of people in the Banija region and specifically the town of Petrinja, Croatia, after an earthquake hit the area in December 2020. It presents their reflections on being confined to “container homes” in three different situations: living in container settlements on the outskirts of town; spending time in a container shopping center; and finding shelter in containers adjacent to destroyed houses. The study shows that temporary container housing frequently turned into permanent living and working solutions during the three years of post-earthquake reconstruction. It also argues the importance of acknowledging that the sense of isolation in disaster-affected areas and the loss of potential for renovation and development do not merely arise from “container life” but reveal the longer-run “polycrisis” involved.