This paper delivers actionable recommendations towards building a rationale for activating and promoting Underground Built Heritage (UBH) based on the nexus heritage, territory and society, and making use of existing literature and findings from five international cases. The research was conducted in the framework of the working group on Planning Approaches of the COST Action Underground4value. The analysis of the cases aims to provide guidelines for this working group and to benchmark good practices in activating UBH. It highlights the importance of community-led initiatives, leadership and dialogue and power sharing between the local/regional authorities and communities aiming for better understanding of the potential of UBH. The successes and/or failures of the five cases emphasise the importance of knowledge and experience in participatory approaches. Success was verified, when effectiveness and democratic principles were combined in the planning process, and local history is integrated with citizen science, co-creation and placemaking. The analysed approaches stimulate a new hybrid layer for activating UBH, provide mechanisms of mediation between people and heritage, and contribute to cultural and social dimensions of sustainability. This is a highly challenging endeavour, as it seeks to support and advance a sound understanding of UBH as a sustainable resource, backed by strategic stakeholder dialogue and contextual knowledge. Such effort requires a dynamic understanding of UBH values, knowledge, abilities and skills, towards creating more effective coalitions of “actors” within localities, by developing structures, which encourage long term collaborative relationships.

CyberParks aims at advancing knowledge on the relationship between information and communication technologies and the socially sustainable production and usage of public open spaces. Such research necessitates a solid methodological base. Urban ethnography brings together a number of perspectives and approaches to deal with cultural and social aspects of urban life, and as such it is able to provide an integrated methodological framework for the study of technology-public space relationship. The ethnographic approach means, by definition, an in-depth, micro-scale look at the phenomena under concern. However, the technological dimension makes the relationship between people and space more complex. This is not simply because an additional layer of analysis is added; it comes as a result of the emergence of multiple connections between the real and the virtual. From an ethnographic perspective, this requires the researcher to capture, explore and understand the cyber-social phenomena and dynamics in a multifaceted, hybrid, triangulated and cross-referenced way. This makes ethnographic research much more complicated but more interesting as well. The current chapter attempts to outline such an analytical framework to guide empirical research on the issues. This framework draws on the public space literature and adds the technological dimension brought in by the CyberParks project. We argue that this enriches the ethnographic approach providing a more integrated framework for the analysis of the relationship between people, space and technology.

Rapid urbanization highlights the increasing importance of urban green infrastructure in shaping urban spatial organization, quality of life, and environmental sustainability. This study examines spatial inequalities in the provision of urban parks in Sofia (Bulgaria) and Istanbul (Republic of Türkiye) from a comparative urban geography perspective. The two cities are selected as contrasting urban contexts in Southeastern Europe, characterized by different patterns of urban development, population density, and spatial structures. A GIS-based analytical framework is applied at the district administrative level, integrating indicators such as the share of urban parks, park area per capita, Local Moran’s I, and the Gini coefficient. The results reveal distinct spatial patterns: Sofia demonstrates relatively higher levels of park provision but pronounced inequalities, characterized by the concentration of large park areas in a limited number of central districts. In contrast, Istanbul exhibits a more even spatial distribution but significantly lower levels of park area per capita, indicating an overall shortage of urban park space. The findings demonstrate that Sofia and Istanbul experience different forms of spatial disparities in park provision due to distinct trajectories of urban development.

This study assessed spatial, seasonal, and interannual variability in physical and biogeochemical indicators in surface waters along the Bulgarian Black Sea coast during 2022–2025 to provide an integrated characterization of coastal marine conditions. Copernicus Marine Level 4 multiyear reanalysis products at 0.025° × 0.025° resolution were aggregated into four climatological seasons and summarized for a 25 km coastal strip divided at Cape Emine into northern and southern sectors. Sea-water potential temperature increased from a four-year winter mean of 9.02 °C to 24.70 °C in summer, with the southern sector warmer in all 16 season–year comparisons. Salinity peaked in winter (18.276 × 10⁻³) and was lowest in summer (17.684 × 10⁻³), with consistently higher values in the south. Current-vector magnitude was highest in summer (0.0614 m s⁻¹), without persistent sectoral predominance. Chlorophyll-a, net primary production, phytoplankton carbon biomass, and dissolved molecular oxygen peaked in spring and were consistently higher in the northern sector; nitrate was also higher there in 15 of 16 comparisons. Biological productivity peaked in spring 2024, while 2025 showed lower biological indicators than 2022 across all season–sector combinations. The four-year series does not support long-term trend inference but provides a reproducible framework for integrated coastal assessment.