It remains unclear whether the decision to cook with both polluting and cleaner-burning fuels (‘fuel stacking’) serves as a transition phase towards the full adoption of clean-cooking practices, or whether stacking allows households to enhance fuel security and choose from a variety of cooking technologies and processes. This paper offers a unique contribution to the debate by positioning fuel stacking as the central research question in the exploration of existing household survey data. This research analyses the World Bank’s Multi-Tier Framework survey data concerning energy access and cooking practices in Cambodia, Myanmar, and Zambia. Its novel approach uses fuel expenditure data to group urban households according to the intensity of biomass consumption (wood, charcoal) relative to modern fuel consumption (electricity, gas). The research explores how different fuel-stacking contexts are associated with factors related to household finances, composition, experiences of electricity, and attitudes towards modern fuels. This study shows the diversity of characteristics and behaviours associated with fuel stacking in urban contexts, thus demonstrating the need for fuel stacking to feature prominently in future data collection activities. The paper ends with five key recommendations for further research into fuel stacking and its role in clean-cooking transitions.

The discipline of geography struggles to engage with urban futures on terms that are meaningful to the world's urban majority. This paper reflects the need to open up empirically grounded dialogue on aspirations and their complex connections to perceptions of possibility and temporality. Drawing on research carried out in two medium‐sized cities overlooked by research (Bharatpur, Nepal; Zarqa, Jordan), this paper speaks back to contemporary discourse surrounding urban life and futurity. These two projects explore aspirations located within people's everyday attempts to secure urban presents and carve out spaces for the immediate future within the realm of their control. Urban futures, it is argued, need to be imagined from the perspective of the communities experiencing the complexities and uncertainties of the urban present first‐hand, and who tailor their aspirations and expectations accordingly. In both Bharatpur and Zarqa, “grey space” proves successful in framing the roles of influence, control, and management of power in determining possibility. In Bharatpur, residents learned that only by working together in neighbourhood groups could they begin to influence the local authority to provide certain aspects of physical infrastructure – the paved roads that residents had particularly hoped for. In Zarqa, residents turn to a variety of formal channels – political and developmental – in their attempts to reverse locally manifesting urban decay and provide much‐needed green spaces for the local community. In both contexts, these local, collectively‐held aspirations are deeply linked to local perceptions of possibility, which in turn are a direct result of governance structures seeking to maintain particular urban relations and to control the pace and space of urban development.