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Participatory planning and planning for resilience figure as major trends in striving towards urban sustainability. Yet, recent studies problematize citizen participation in planning for resilience, indicating the need for closer research on surrounding processes and the limits planners face in leading participants to sustainable outcomes. Providing a basis for cross-case learning, the paper examines five urban planning projects in Northern Europe that attempted to involve stakeholders in enhancing urban resilience via nature-based solutions. Considering structural factors that limit planners' agency in the Nordic and (post-socialist) Baltic context, the results convey tensions between inclusivity and resilience as common challenges across cases that manifest in conflicts over landscape aesthetics, neoliberal contestations of space, and diverting priority setting of stakeholders. The paper argues that these challenges triggered creative strategies which unleashed potentials for transformative planning agency including attempts to gain legitimacy and stakeholder support, build environmental awareness and knowledge among stakeholder groups, and facilitate conflict resolution in stakeholder interactions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the role of conflict in challenging dominant, heteropatriarchal structures of urban development and infrastructure governance through the case of Reidi Road in Tallinn, Estonia. Applying a critical gender lens informed by post-socialist and post-colonial discourses, the study examines the formation of the Reidi Road project through shifting political economic regimes and modes of spatial restructuring along with its contestation by an activist network led by women who encounter and negotiate gender-based identities and politics in a context where feminism is stigmatized by historical associations with coloniality. The paper analyses the situated and relational experiences, concerns, and contentions of the women activists with respect to car-centric mobility infrastructures and built environments and their efforts to shift public decision-making. Partly undertaken as a reflective practice by the women activist leaders, the paper concludes with takeaways for continued struggles and gains toward more inclusive and equitable urban futures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The research report analyses the concept of competence, distinguishes its main elements and significance for companies and employees. The empirical part presents the results of research on the asymmetry of competences of employees in the field of cultural tourism in the following groups of competences: functional, managerial, social, cognitive and personal. At the end of the research report, conclusions and recommendations for improving competencies are presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we explore the current process of the smoke sauna's transformation from a tradition into heritage in the context of rural tourism in Vôru County, southeast Estonia. We examine the multiple meanings and values that the smoke carries from the tourism entrepreneur's perspective and the possible connections between the smoke sauna and personally interpreted cultural identity. Our theoretical approach handles heritage production as a selective process conducted by tourism entrepreneurs, in which personal memories, stories and material settings are displayed or performed in order to make them experienceable for the public. The results of the analysis of the fieldwork material indicate that three major directorial attitudes towards local tradition and heritage exist, expressed in the materiality of sauna settings, whereas entrepreneurs' interpretations of the intangible dimensions of the smoke sauna are more varied as they are based on emotional and personally significant meanings rather than shared cultural values. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The cattle breeds that have been exploited in European countries have evolved through centuries. The characteristics of specific breeds have been determined by their habitation, i.e. by the surrounding natural and geographical environment. This determined the nutrition, the anatomic features, the milk yield, the fat content in milk, the muscle mass etc. The present article will show that in addition to the natural conditions also administrative division may lead to different cattle breeds being bred on a territory with relatively similar vegetation as well as climatic, geographic and demographic conditions. One of such territories is the area inhabited by Estonians that became a part of the Russian Empire in 1721 as the Provinces of Estonia and Livonia (the Northern part of the latter). The province was unified after the February revolution in 1917, and in 1918 the Republic of Estonia was born. The insight into the history of cattle breeding in Estonia, illustrated by distribution maps of main cattle breeds, will show that even today these administrative boundaries that ceased to exist long ago, still have an impact on cattle breeding in Estonia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]