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The “green transition” has become the dominant policy response and institutional climate-action narrative, driven in Europe primarily by private-sector megaprojects—from battery plants to green steel and hydrogen facilities. Although these narratives claim to address social inequality, their rapid, growth-oriented logic risks sidelining justice, obscuring entanglements with past extraction, displacement and dispossession.

Through an architectural lens, I critically engage these entanglements by examining how built environments both enable and unsettle them through multimedia mapping. Working with a pilot site in Skellefteå, northern Sweden, the multimedia mapping combines archival and document analysis, field recordings, and audiovisual storytelling. In this presentation, I will show latent stories uncovered by the mapping and examine how these challenge and create alternatives to green transition narratives, effectively contesting their hegemony.

Initial insights include:

• Residue & Rubble: Toxic soils as geological archives of environmental injustice.
• Riot & Precarity: Worker mobilisations refracted through crisis-driven growth rhetorics.
• Interstitial Temporality: Ambiguous in-between moments within boom-bust cycles that defy linear progress

By revealing latent stories, multimedia mapping lays the groundwork for using built environments as sites of engagement, disorienting growth narratives and imagining more just transitions. Layered media and creative methods also foster broader care-driven conversations on climate and urban futures. 

The workshop method outlined in this paper is part of ongoing research work in Hammarkullen, Gothenburg – a neighbourhood built in the 1960s as part of the Swedish Million Homes Programme (Hall & Vidén, 2005). This work maps the historical evolution of local community resources and actors through interviews with individuals involved in circularity and sharing practices emphasising their social and everyday dimensions (Hobson, 2020). Experiences from this work have raised questions regarding what it means to talk about concepts such as sustainability, sharing, and circularity without a locally established (and collectively shared) vocabulary around them. 

Mainstream concepts of circularity often overlook local socio-material practices in favour of market-driven, techno-based solutions. This paper argues for a community-based approach to foster a grounded socio-economic transition. It explores the potential of circularity initiatives becoming urban living labs (ULLs) by integrating institutional understandings of circularity with local vocabularies and practices. It aims to disentangle the tensions that such integration might have to overcome and define the (latent) potentials embedded in local practices. The study focuses on Fixoteket Hammarkullen, a collaborative initiative in a late modernist suburb of Gothenburg in Sweden. Using a qualitative methodology combining a historical narrative approach with actor–network theory sensitivity, it traces Fixoteket’s evolution from an experimental reuse centre to a municipally managed space. Drawing on interviews, document analysis, site observations and a workshop, the contextual conditions that shaped Fixoteket’s development are examined. These shifting relationships, roles and power dynamics have (dis)connected Fixoteket from the local community. Re-anchoring circularity in local vocabularies and networks could (re)activate its potential as a ULL. These understandings about the processes, collaborations and relationships can inform community-rooted social infrastructures and foster more inclusive, context-sensitive urban sustainability transitions.

This paper reflects on the experiences and understandings gained through a pre-study conducted as a part of a larger project. The focus is on the potentials for learning embedded in relational networks of formal and informal practices of circularity and sharing, in the specific case of the suburban area Hammarkullen in Gothenburg.

As a departure point, the project looks at Fixoteket in Hammarkullen, a local repair workshop and meeting place that is driven by a municipal housing company. It investigates the contextual relations and conditions that have enabled its becoming. It includes an analysis of documents and semi-structured interviews that combines an actor-network sensitivity with a historical narrative approach, mapping key events, local actors, and artefacts (objects/spaces/materials). Rooted in the need for local government to be more attuned to how circularity is understood and practised locally, the investigation emphasises knowledge and vocabularies used around sharing practices specific to, in this case, Hammarkullen. Local knowledge and vocabularies are seen as ways through which hidden or latent potentials might be revealed.

The insights gained from this mapping were then tested and co-examined with relevant local stakeholders in a workshop to expand them and trace potential futures for Fixoteket, collectively speculating about new collaborations between existing actors and ways in which they could learn from each other, as well as about events that could activate existing spaces and tools in new and imaginative ways. The results from the workshop form the basis for future research into the potential of how existing relational networks of sharing practices can challenge the mainstream idea of circularity towards a new circularity model that also encompasses informal or frugal practices.