The paper presents the requirements and challenges of urban transitions towards sustainability from the perspective of the SAB of the JPI Urban Europe. Critical reflections on the achievements and identification of gaps in the activities of JPI Urban Europe, based on the Strategic Research and Innovation Agenda SRIA (2015–2020), reveal advanced research questions, tasks, and approaches that influenced the development process of the SRIA 2.0 (released in February 2019). The authors emphasize the dilemma approach, the local context and the co-creation concept to pursue urban transitions in real-world context. Considering this frame, they propose specific domains for further research on urban transitions.

Praxeological turn in social research resulted in many examples of empirical studies using the concept of social practice. They are mostly case studies of a single or clearly defined practices, such as cooking, dancing or energy consumption. There is a lack of studies employing this concept as a framework for research on complex, dynamic and empirically hard to reach socio-spatial phenomena, such as urban housing estates. Drawing from the experience of a 4-year research project in six housing estates in three Polish cities we present and debate methodological challenges in applying theories of practice to urban research. We discuss methodological implications of representational and heuristic models of explanation – which are being applied in practice-based research. We highlight the ambiguity of the notion of social practice in the existing literature and its troublesome ‘double nature’ – implying that social practices are both implicit and observable phenomena –which, although alluring in the stage of conceptualisation, poses challenges in the stage of data collection, analysis and interpretation.

The COVID‐19 pandemic has disrupted modern urban ecosystems on an unprecedented scale. Many urban scholars have undertaken the challenge of documenting and analysing how this global health crisis has been experienced and coped with, resulting in a surge of studies on its impact on various cityscapes and domains of urban life. In this paper, we present findings from a scoping review of 138 articles on this subject published between the outbreak of the pandemic and the end of June 2022. Our review showcases scholarly accounts of cascading shifts that have occurred within urban ecosystems and provides a better understanding of conceptual and methodological alterations in research approaches. Because both the investigated impacts and the research strategies deal primarily with the consequences of losing the pre‐pandemic spatial, temporal, social, cultural, and political frames of reference, we adopt transdisciplinary disorientation theories as the review’s interpretive framework. This step proves to be fruitful in mapping and interpreting crises and breakdowns and also in revealing how an unexpected planetary ordeal has reoriented pre‐pandemic trends in urban development and transformed cities and urban life alike. We suggest that the disorienting pandemic experience can serve as a potent legacy for urban futures. However, the scale and distribution of post‐pandemic reorientations across European cities and their residents cannot yet be fully comprehended.

In this article we analyse the socio-spatial contexts and consequences of the practice of car parking in housing estates. Fredrik Barth’s idea of socially constructed boundaries and the theory of social practice form the theoretical basis of our analysis. The empirical material comes from research conducted in 2016 and 2017 in three Polish cities. We analyse the practice of parking in terms of the specific aspect of mobility that is ‘mooring’. The research shows that parking practices influence the structuring of territorial communities in housing estates on two levels: everyday activities, norms and rules, as well as social differences and boundaries in the space occupied by the housing estate.