1. Introduction
Climate change and the biodiversity crisis are well described, and researchers have for long argued for the need for rapid change of affluent societies towards ways of living within planetary boundaries (Rockström et al. 2023). The concept of sufficiency has been put forward as important in understanding how to live well within planetary boundaries (Darby 2007; Di Giulio & Fuchs 2014; Princen 2005). Sufficiency is about ‘enoughness’ and attempts to operationalise what is sufficient for living a good life. The concept is sceptical about strategies based solely on technological development and efficiency, because it is well-described how efficiency often does not lead to lower resource use but rather to more demanding lifestyles (Alfredsson et al. 2018; Gram-Hanssen 2013; Princen 2005). Efficient technology may be part of a sufficient future, but only if it is simultaneously recognised that planetary boundaries set limits to the overall resource consumption (Princen 2005). A further important aspect of the sufficiency literature is its call for equal rights for all humans, present and future, to be able to strive for a decent and good life. Together, this translates into discussions of the upper and lower limits of consumption (e.g. consumption corridors), where the upper limits of resource use are particular important in a Global North context (Di Giulio & Fuchs 2014; Spangenberg & Lorek 2019).
Practice theories have been put forward by many scholars as a way to understand consumption (Gram-Hanssen 2011; Røpke 2009; Shove & Walker 2014). Within practice theories, all types of resource use can be linked to consumption, which again can be understood as an integrated part of practice performances (Warde 2005). Practices are collective in the sense that many people carry the same practices, which are held together by shared elements such as materialities, understandings, rules, engagements and know-how (Gram-Hanssen 2011; Reckwitz 2002; Schatzki 2002). In this understanding, individual consumers do not rationally decide how to live and consume; instead, ways of living and consuming are seen as the outcome of collectively shared practices. This paper applies practice theories and is therefore critical of approaches that emphasise the role of (individual) consumers and behavioural change in the sense of rational choice. Instead, and without ignoring the importance of individual variety in practice performances for changing practices (Christensen et al. 2024; Gram-Hanssen 2021), the collective nature of practices is highlighted. Individual performances are always situated and thereby tightly linked to the material arrangements and social institutions that they unfold within and reproduce.
Following from this understanding, one approach to promote less resource-intensive practices could be to replace and rebuild the materiality of cities and infrastructures, as the present materialities have been built for living with fossil fuel abundance. However, as shown from lifecycle assessments (LCAs) within the construction sector, the rebuilding of buildings and cities is itself wasteful and often costs more in resources than what the new and more efficient buildings save during usage (Zimmermann et al. 2023). Furthermore, new construction of what could be called the ‘hardware’ of cities—roads, railways, infrastructures, buildings, etc.—is time-consuming. A more sufficient, and fast, approach is thus to reuse what is already built.
From a practice–theoretical perspective, changing practices can also be about changing understandings, norms, rules and know-how, or how practices interconnect. This could be called changing the ‘software’ of the lived life, related to the social institutions that practices unfold within and how practices interlock (Blue 2019; Spurling & McMeekin 2014). Changing social institutions is not as resource intensive and wasteful as changing material arrangements; however, changing established institutions may take longer than what the ecological urgency allows.
Taken together, this leads to the key observation and point of departure for this paper: To a wide extent, the adoption of less resource-intensive everyday practices must take place with the least possible changes of present arrangements of materialities and institutions created through times of abundant and inexpensive resources, especially fossil fuels (Smil 2018). The aim of the paper is to explore theoretically and empirically the possible pathways for such ways of adopting new, sufficiency-based everyday practices. This is done by developing the concept of ‘reprogramming’, which includes modifying or adjusting existing material arrangements and institutions in ways that promote general shifts to resource-light practices.
The paper is structured as follows. Next, the theoretical approaches of sufficiency and practice theories are introduced. These are then related to the concepts of material and institutional arrangements and the field of social metabolism. The empirical findings are then presented on young adults who recently moved out of the city. These empirical insights lead to a discussion about the potential of reprogramming existing material and institutional arrangements with a policy focus. Finally, the viability of the reprogramming concept is considered in a wider context of sufficiency.
2. Conceptualising sufficiency within a practice–theoretical perspective
In their review of studies on sufficiency, Jungell-Michelsson & Heikkurinen (2022) find a tendency in the literature to focus on individuals and individual behaviour and less on societal structures and production (e.g. systems of provision). This tendency to treat sufficiency actions as mainly representations of individual behaviour, agency and lifestyles implies an inclination to understand the limitations of the spreading of such actions in terms of barriers. For instance, Sandberg (2021) identifies five key barriers to sufficiency transitions: consumer attitudes and behaviour; culture; the economic system; the political system; and the physical environment. This shows that the social and material conditioning of sufficiency-related everyday practices is generally recognised in the literature, as well as the need for more thorough changes in social and material structures. However, the tendency to focus on individual consumption behaviour implies that how these ‘external’ elements are constituting sufficiency practices is often underdeveloped in the analysis. Similarly, Lorek & Spangenberg (2019: 293) note, with reference to sufficiency in housing, that:
politics and policies should recognise sufficiency as a field of action instead of referring to individual decisions and lifestyles.
With a shift of the analytical focus from individual agency and individual actors to collectively shared practices, practice theories have informed such conceptual elaborations within the sufficiency field. Welch & Warde (2015: 85) note that most practice–theoretical approaches seem to agree on that a social practice is:
an organized, and recognizable, socially shared bundle of activities that involves the integration of a complex array of components: material, embodied, ideational and affective.
Speck & Hasselkuss (2015) were one of the first to apply practice theories to a qualitative study of sufficiency practices in German households. The authors establish links between consumption and everyday practices and find that the meaning element of practices is key to understand why some people adopt resource-light practices. However, they point out that adopting resource-light practices is not necessarily related to environmental concerns, but can be related to other meanings as well, such as health (e.g. active mobility instead of driving) or convenience (e.g. cycling instead of driving in dense cities). While Speck and Hasselkuss in one sense interpret sufficiency-related practices as mainly an outcome of individual agency (as they write about sufficiency lifestyles and see these as a ‘reflexive project of the self’; Speck & Hasselkuss 2015: 2), they also acknowledge that for a sufficiency transition to happen on a larger scale, one cannot rely on individual action and changed values alone. In line with practice theories, they conclude that a resource-light society can only be achieved through modifications in the elements holding practices together. Suski et al. (2023) find that such reconfigurations of elements can happen in protected spaces for sustainable niche innovations, e.g. community experiments, where new ‘proto practices’ might emerge.
Other more recent sufficiency studies drawing on practice theories are Kropfeld (2023) in relation to clothing, Moynat (2024) on the role of synergic needs satisfiers supporting ‘degrowth living’, van Moeseke et al. (2024) on residential thermal comfort sufficiency, and Sahakian & Rossier (2022) on voluntary work-time reduction as a sufficiency practice. Similar to Speck & Hasselkuss (2015), Kropfeld (2023: 383) adopts an understanding of sufficiency as lifestyle related, but finds that sufficiency-related practices are not dependent:
only on people’s mindsets, but also on their know-how, skills, and the infrastructure and things surrounding them.
Sahakian & Rossier (2022: 3) see social practices, including practices of sufficiency, as socially embedded and relying on systems of provision. More broadly, they state that:
how people engage as practitioners in a given activity might relate to the skills and competencies they have acquired, as well as the institutional and material conditions in which they are performing a given practice.
Moynat (2024), drawing on Max-Neef’s (1991) concept of needs satisfiers, argues that policymaking and planning should promote collective satisfiers that are synergic in the sense that they meet a multitude of needs simultaneously and are therefore less resource demanding.
Despite differences in how practice theories are applied, the above papers point to the embeddedness of sufficiency-related practices within wider social, cultural, institutional and material contexts. Thus, performing practices in resource-light ways is far from dependent on individual agency and ‘lifestyle projects’ alone, but can either be supported or limited by the social–material context of these practices or the systems of practices (Watson 2012) of which they are part. Rather than studying single sufficiency practices (e.g. repairing, ‘doing without’ or living in small dwellings), as do many of the existing studies, this paper focuses on how the proliferation of resource-light practices is conditioned by the socio-material context of these practices, and how this context could be modified strategically to achieve sufficiency across households and consumption domains. Thus, the paper aims for a conceptualisation, proposed as reprogramming, that applies across all everyday practices, even if the focus is mainly on mobility-related practices.
3. Reprogramming material arrangements and institutions towards sufficiency
Similar to what Sahakian & Rossier (2022) argue, it is important to understand the material and institutional conditions of practices, in part because these conditions are shared by a multiplicity of everyday practices situated in time and space (e.g. infrastructures and institutionalised working and shopping hours). This resonates with Shove et al. (2015) highlighting how it is a defining characteristic of material infrastructures that they typically sustain complexes of practices, e.g. dwellings being the material context for a huge variety of practices such as cooking, sleeping, entertainment, working and cleaning. Other shared characteristics identified by Shove et al. are that infrastructures in most cases are connective, i.e. linking different places, collective, i.e. being used by many, and finally obdurate due to their material ‘massiveness’ and being major investments.
The material conditions are elaborated theoretically with the concept of ‘material arrangements’ by Schatzki (2002, 2010), which defines ‘a set of interconnected material entities’ (Schatzki 2010: 129). To Schatzki, material arrangements and social practices are closely connected, as social life:
always transpires as part of a mesh of practices and arrangements: practices are carried on amid and determinative of, while also depending on and altered by, material arrangements.
In other words, material arrangements (humans, artefacts, organisms and natural objects) and human practices form nexuses. This implies that changing material arrangements affects how practices are performed.
Following these practice–theoretical observations, it is suggested here that strategies of reprogramming should target material arrangements (infrastructures) that sustain a diversity of practices and are conditioning systems of practices. In this way, adjusting or modifying such arrangements can be a way to influence the resource intensity of several practices simultaneously.
3.1 Reducing flows through reprogramming stocks
A second defining characteristic of the concept of reprogramming is that it mainly relates to material arrangements sustaining societal activities with high levels of material and energetic flows. Here, key insights from social ecology and social metabolism research are drawn upon. Concurrently with the historically growing throughput of energy and materials through industrialised societies, an increasing share of this throughput is allocated to building and maintaining biophysical stocks in the shape of people, infrastructures, livestock, durable goods and tools (Fischer-Kowalski & Erb 2016). For instance, more than one-third of the non-metallic minerals used in Europe are allocated to maintaining existing stocks of residential buildings, roads and railways (Wiedenhofer et al. 2015). Krausmann et al. (2017) also find that, by 2010, the global in-use material stocks had risen 23-fold since the beginning of the last century. The dissipative use of inflow materials (consumed as human or animal food or burned for energy use) has fallen from around 75% of all material resources at the beginning of the 20th century to about 40% by 2015 (Schaffartzik et al. 2021). This means that an increasing share of the growing flow of materials (and energy) through society is directed to building and maintain stocks:
Not only were materials increasingly used to build-up stocks, but also the materials with dissipative uses also increasingly flowed through stocks.
These observations have led social metabolism researchers to suggest strategies to reduce resource flows such as more intensive utilisations of existing stocks, more efficient designs and longer service lifetimes (Wiedenhofer et al. 2015; Krausmann et al. 2017). In addition to this, Schaffartzik et al. (2021), while noticing how the existing stocks limit the ‘metabolic corridor’ for sustainability transformations, note that the:
degree to which the amassed stocks can be flexibly used is important for the leeway to alter future socio-metabolic patterns.
However, how to create this flexibility in use appears under-explored in the social metabolism literature, which tends to refer to a more classical understanding of stocks as providing services to people, rather than seeing in-use stocks as shaping and constituting broader social practices.
By drawing on practice theories, this paper suggests reprogramming as a strategy to modify existing material arrangements in ways that promote resource-light practices. Informed by social metabolism studies, such reprogramming strategies should be oriented towards infrastructures associated with particularly high energy and material flows and stocks, such as transport and housing. Reprogramming existing infrastructures instead of building new material arrangements in principle leads to three types of reductions in the resource throughput of society:
- By avoiding additional flows for building new infrastructures to replace or enlarge existing material stocks (e.g. retrofit large single-family homes to become two smaller semi-detached homes instead of adding further dwellings to the existing building stock).
- By avoiding additional flows for maintaining enlarged material stocks (e.g. new building stock).
- By promoting a shift from resource-intensive practice performances to resource-light practices (e.g. less living space per person implies fewer resources per person needed for heating and lighting).
As it also takes resource use to adjust or modify existing infrastructures, such as retrofitting homes from single-family to semi-detached, reprogramming measures entail some resource use. Therefore, reprogramming only makes sense in cases where the needed resources for its implementation are significantly lower than the accumulated, saved material and energetic flows related to the three points above. This points to phases of larger maintenance and follow-up investments in the lifecycle of existing infrastructures to be particularly relevant moments for considering reprogramming strategies (also identified by Schaffartzik et al. 2021 as an entry point for reshaping provisioning systems).
3.2 The role of institutions
While the concept of material arrangements clarifies how materiality influences and is shaped by social practices, and thereby determines levels of resource consumption, it is also important to elaborate how social practices are additionally being shaped by broader social patterns or configurations. Here, Blue’s (2019) conceptualisation of institutional rhythms is helpful. Blue applies a dynamic understanding of institutions as not being independent entities, but as being essentially made of clusters of interacting practices. Actions in practices-as-performances ‘collect into spatiotemporal networks that run through and connect different practices as “institutions” […]’ (Blue 2019: 927). Thus, institutions are:
strongly connected organisations of practices, combinations and configurations that are regularly reproduced, and that […] have particular and varied effects across the plenum of the social.
To Blue, time (and space) is a constitutive and inherent feature of practices, and his focus is on how the dynamic and polyrhythmic interplay of practices creates temporal connections of both resonance and dissonance. It is from the intricate interplay of practices, unfolding in time and space, that institutional rhythms emerge through processes of institutionalisation. Within the polyrhythms of connected practices, it is possible to identify ‘which rhythms impel others to assume synchronization’ and ‘to search for distantly connected and affected rhythms’ (Blue 2019: 942).
The point here is that some rhythms are more decisive in temporally structuring social life than others. Examples of such rhythms could be working and shopping hours or rhythms of family life.
While Blue focuses on the temporal connections between practices, he points out that institutions, seen as sets of connected practices, can also be connected in other ways, e.g. through shared practical understandings and rules. In the following, the concept of institutions (and institutional arrangements) is applied as systems of connected practices that are shaping and organising a variety of practices across time and space, often connected via institutional rhythms, but also, for instance, through rules and the regulation of everyday practices (e.g. subsidising of specific practices, such as the Danish tax deduction rules related to commuting).
Taken together, material and institutional arrangements are constitutive for how social practices unfold within time and space. Reprogramming is about changing people’s social practices, but not through addressing people as rational or choice-making individuals, but by making resource-light and sufficient practice performances the default through changes in material and institutional arrangements. The question is then how transitions in everyday life towards sufficiency can be facilitated with the least possible changes in the material arrangements, and what changes in institutions can help promote this.
4. Empirical examples of resource-light practice performances within existing materialities and institutions
The following section provides empirical examples of how everyday practices are affected when people move away from metropolitan areas. This illustrates the importance of material and institutional arrangements to the resource intensity of everyday practices, specifically in relation to mobility. The examples thus indicate why and where reprogramming could be relevant. Rather than forming a conventional empirical analysis, the section serves as a starting point for discussing what a strategy of reprogramming could entail in practice, and which material and institutional arrangements to target, elaborated in Section 5.
4.1 Qualitative study of young danish adults
The following empirical examples are taken from a study of young adults in Denmark (25–35 years old, 31 respondents in total). The study was conducted as part of the research project Food, Mobility and Housing in the Sustainable Transition of Everyday Life (FoMoHo), and the participants—initially all living in apartments in metropolitan areas—were recruited on the basis of planning to move within a year (see e.g. Juvik & Halkier 2023). Two rounds of in-depth interviews were carried out, one prior to participants’ move (fall 2021) and one after (fall 2022). Apart from moving, several of the participants recently had children, which for many affected their desire to move to a larger space and have access to a garden. The group of respondents was selected in light of existing research showing how life-course transitions such as moving and establishing a family are likely to influence and reconfigure habits and routines (Hunt 2017; Thompson et al. 2011).
Young adults in the process of moving thus provide an empirical basis for understanding how consumption practices change in relation to shifting material arrangements and social environments. While there was variation in household composition and motivation for moving, for the purpose of this paper empirical examples were selected of households with children that had moved to detached homes (for an overview, see Table 1). The households had recently moved away from an urban setting that supports a relatively resource-light everyday life, e.g. mobility by bike or public transport, compared with the suburban and rural areas where they had moved to. The latter areas are dominated by car-based infrastructures and a predominance of detached single-family homes. As mentioned, the interviewed adults also had children recently, which is important for their coordination of everyday life, as they also become enrolled in the institutional rhythms of being a family with small children (e.g. taking and picking up children from daycare during fixed times of the day).
Table 1
Key characteristics of the selected households.
| PSEUDONYMS | HOUSING PRIOR TO MOVING (ALL IN AN URBAN SETTING) | HOUSING AFTER MOVING | CHILDREN |
|---|---|---|---|
| Asger and Jasmin | Owner-occupied apartment | Owner-occupied house in a suburb | 2 |
| Laura and Jonas | Owner-occupied apartment | Owner-occupied house in a village | 2 |
| Maria and Peter | Owner-occupied apartment | Owner-occupied house in a suburb | 2 |
| Anders and Carla | Owner-occupied apartment | Owner-occupied house in a suburb | 1 |
| Sofia and Michael | Rented apartment | Owner-occupied house in a suburb | 1 |
The study shows how the interviewees experience their new social–material surroundings and how these affect their performance of daily practices. As car dependence figures highly in the interview narratives, and as this is a resource-intense practice, focus will be on everyday mobility practices and how many of the interviewees maintained some previous resource-light mobility practices (e.g. cycling and the use of public transport) even within their new settings. The section elaborates on these examples to show how the material and institutional arrangements are decisive for the tensions and competition between resource-light and -heavy mobility practices.
4.2 How moving out of the city affects mobility practices
When moving out of the city, interviewees speak of an increase in daily coordination work. Daily obligations such as work, grocery shopping, children’s daycare, visiting friends and family, and attending leisure activities need to be more tightly planned, as the longer distances put pressure on the logistics around the rhythms of everyday life. While all the households referred to in this paper had a car prior to the move, they used them rarely when living in the city. However, after the move, the cars were experienced as a necessity. As often brought up in the interviews, having a car when living outside the city is considered not only normal but also practically mandatory. While this is mostly ascribed to the long distances, even shorter distances that would previously be covered by bike or on foot now quickly end up as car journeys.
The car is taken for granted as a natural part of suburban and rural environments, and interviewees note that taking the car is just ‘what everyone does’ in their new surroundings, also supported by the car being ‘parked right outside’ home (contrary to in the city where it is usually parked further away). An interviewee, Asger, shares an anecdote from when he and his partner Jasmin had just moved to their new house. He is about to drive to the supermarket less than 1 km away when Jasmin interrupts him, asking if he is really going to do that. He pauses, suddenly becoming aware that he has adopted a new habit:
Actually, it wasn’t because I had to take the car. It was more like, that’s what you do down here, you take the car when you move here. You don’t cycle like before.
The replacement of cycling with driving thus connects to site-specific norms, adjusting to a new mobility culture and mimicking neighbours’ practices (‘that’s what everyone does out here’). Something also supporting the car as the main mobility mode is, for instance, the experience of public transport as being inflexible, i.e. being too scattered or running infrequently, which the following quotation by Anders illustrates:
That’s what everyone says, once you move to the countryside you become dependent on the car, and that’s just so true. I mean, you are really inhibited [if] you have to wait for that bus, and it stops driving around seven.
These mobility norms relate to time constraints (e.g. not having time to wait for the bus), infrastructures (favouring the car) and lack of satisfactory material arrangements supporting resource-light mobility, e.g. cycling or public transport. An example of these insufficient material arrangements is unsafe cycling routes. As another interviewee, Laura, explains:
The reason why I’m not thinking, oh well, then I just cycle there [to work] is because the road from here and the highway to [name of village near a Danish city], it’s pitch dark. There are no lights. So you are just cycling in complete darkness on the highway, and I find that extremely uncomfortable. So I don’t want to do that.
This example shows how the practice of cycling to work depends on (in this case, unsatisfactory) material arrangements. With no streetlights or demarcated cycling path, the highway only supports car-based mobility. However, through a strategy of reprogramming, the material arrangements could be modified without large infrastructural investments, thus reserving some of the highway for a cycling path and adding streetlights.
The move away from the city involves increased transportation related to longer distances, but also more time spent moving around. Time is considered a sparse and precious resource in everyday life and is often framed as something that could be better spent (e.g. time with the children). For instance, Laura and Jonas consider purchasing a second car:
because if Jonas takes the car to work, he can cut off half an hour each way, getting back and forth. And that’s quite a lot in terms of picking up the kids and spending time with them.
(Laura)
Indicating how practices of working, commuting and parenting are connected by institutional rhythms around working hours and family life, this quotation points to temporality playing a central role in the daily organisation of family life. As Laura also says, ‘Time is just something you need to make the most of with small children.’ These institutional arrangements around work and family life support the prioritisation of fast mobility practices. Due to the infrastructural layout of the rural and suburban contexts, these practices often become car dependent and thus more resource intensive.
The long distances between the home, workplace and children’s daycare are a compromise the young adults in the study have deliberately made to buy their own house and have private outdoor spaces. While many appreciated living in the city, staying there and getting a house and a private garden is for most people too expensive. Moving out of the city thus becomes a way of realising a specific housing demand, and in this, mobility practices appear secondary (Samson 2024). As the car becomes a new normal for many, attempts to uphold resource-light mobility practices are nonetheless also performed, for instance enabled by well-connected public transport or closer proximity to family assisting in looking after and picking up children. The next section elaborates on these practice dynamics to shed light on the reprogramming potentials within existing material and institutional arrangements.
4.3 Continuation of resource-light practices
The assistance of grandparents picking up children is mentioned by some interviewees as an important help in ensuring the coordination of daily life, relieving mobility pressures and providing flexibility. One couple, Peter and Maria, states that they generally use the car less often after having moved closer to Maria’s parents whom they often visit. Now they can reach them on foot or by bike (e.g. after picking up the children from daycare). Another way of limiting mobility is working from home. Several interviewees note that this frees up time, provides more flexibility and makes them able to pick up their children earlier.
Asger, who still takes public transport to work after their move, thinks ‘it works pretty good’ and he can bring their son to daycare when he cycles to the station. However, Asger’s appreciation of this everyday rhythm is underscored by him working from home several days a week. In general, he notes that he ‘discovered that I actually don’t move around that much’. When he and his partner Jasmin lived in the city, they used their bikes frequently, and after their move Asger can continue some of these lighter mobility practices supported by the flexibility of being able to work from home. He also notes that parking is expensive at his workplace, which among all interviewees seems to be an important factor in deciding whether or not to take the car to work. Thus, both institutional arrangements around working conditions and material arrangements connected to parking play a central role. Jasmin has begun to take the car after their move, even though she prefers to cycle. The 30-km distance to work and the free parking at her workplace have the final say.
As mentioned, public transport is often viewed as inconvenient and inflexible; however, some interviewees hold on to this mobility mode. An interviewee, Sofia, explains that what she especially appreciates about the bus, besides not having to bother finding parking, is the freedom of not ‘being dependent upon a car’. Furthermore, she underlines a flexibility in this by stating: ‘It’s just so easy with the pram to simply trudge onto the bus.’ Riding the bus thus makes her mobile with the pram and is combined well with walking. However, as part of moving out of the city, she also experiences the buses running less frequently, and she misses being able to use public transport without having to plan. In the city, she says:
they ran all the time. While here, I might stand for 45 minutes before something arrives, or half an hour.
Sofia’s reflections illustrate how public transport can both provide a sense of freedom and physical flexibility, e.g. by combining motorised and active mobility well. However, her reflections also show that this freedom and flexibility risk being undermined by the added time and insecurity caused by infrequent and unreliable bus departures outside the city. While she may become accustomed to such daily annoyances, there is also a risk that the continuation of her resource-light mobility practices might not be upheld. This underscores the importance of high and reliable frequencies within public transport to ensure that resource-light mobility practices are not outperformed by the car.
Another resource-light alternative to the car is the electric cargo bike, which is generally popular in Danish cities as people can fit in several children while upholding their daily obligations, such as grocery shopping. The couple Jonas and Laura are considering getting one, because, as Laura notes, it has the benefit of not being affected by the rush hour, in contrast to both the car and the bus. Thus, they would not risk the delays caused by traffic congestion. This alternative is thus especially useful in dense urban settings. However, although electric cargo bikes ride considerably faster than regular bikes, they will still have a long travel time for distances above 20 km, which characterise most of the commutes that the young adults face after their move. Thus, electric cargo bikes are unlikely to fulfil all mobility needs of families who have moved out of the city, although being near ideal for urban settings and trips below 20 km. In rural and suburban contexts, the young adults thus face a more car-dependent organisation of everyday life which risks ruling out resource-lighter practices, as the material and institutional arrangements primarily support car-based mobility.
4.4 Institutional and material embeddedness of practice performances
The above illustrates how the young adults’ embodied routines from the urban setting meet and interact with the new suburban or rural material arrangements, and how this interaction is influenced by their individual practice biographies. While some mobility modes quickly change towards being more resource intensive, several interviewees manage to hold on to resource-light practices such as cycling or using public transport. These interviewees, however, also report experiences of ‘swimming against the tide’ (similar to the findings of Speck & Hasselkus 2015, and others), i.e. performing practices in a resource-light fashion despite institutional and material arrangements designed and scripted for resource-intensive performances. As seen above, such experiences relate to discomfort and insecurity, e.g. in the form of lacking streetlights on commuting routes, heavy road traffic, the lack of bicycle lanes and footpaths, or exposure to the weather. It can also relate to inconvenience, for instance because of poor public connections and much waiting time, the need for more coordination of activities, and tasks within the family.
Driving private cars, on the other hand, is mostly reported as free from these constraints. The car dependency connects to particular institutional and material arrangements, material in the sense of a lesser public transport service, infrastructures built for cars, and the spatial dispersion of housing and activities (e.g. shopping, spare time activities, work, etc.), and institutional in the sense of dependence on institutional rhythms (e.g. opening hours of daycare) and common narratives such as when living in the suburb, you need a car (Freudendal-Pedersen 2022). Also, the interviewees reflect on their mobility practices compared with their neighbours who seem to drive to almost everything and often have two cars (which several of the interviewees considered getting).
These observations highlight the importance of the institutional and material embeddedness of practice performances in understanding the prospects for promoting sufficiency-oriented practices in a strategy of reprogramming. While the suburban and rural settings seem to pull the newcomers towards resource-intensive mobility practices, there also remains some flexibility in the practices performed. In line with interviewees’ practice biographies from living in the city, the meanings and competences are already in place for cycling or taking public transport. However, with the new setting supporting resource-heavier mobility, the window of opportunity for continuing and disseminating resource-lighter practices becomes small. Researchers such as Speck & Hasselkuss (2015) highlight the potential in the meaning element—the deliberate ethical orientation towards ‘living green’—but in the new, resource-intense context this element risks being overruled. Furthermore, the ‘behaving green’ sentiment underscores individual choice (which is only relevant to the few), and institutional and material arrangements often prove more significant to the embedment of collective practices. Therefore, the strategy of reprogramming targets institutional and material arrangements, including how these can be modified with minimum environmental impact, which Section 5 elaborates on through a discussion of concrete initiatives.
Competences are another element to consider in discussing the uptake of resource-light practices, and the observation here is that the resource-light practices of the interviewees are made possible by their previous mobility experiences and embodied routines from living in the city. A sufficiency strategy could therefore be to promote such competences in support of resource-efficient ways of practising everyday life, for instance through dissemination campaigns, education, community-building around experiences with alternative ways of doing things, etc. However, the prospect for this type of sufficiency strategy appears bleak given the present societal development towards increasing consumption levels and existing resource-intensive material and institutional arrangements.
To summarise, the empirical examples show that while it is possible to perform practices (more) resource-light within existing institutional and material arrangements, this often requires both a high level of dedication by such ‘sufficiency practitioners’ as well as the presence of competences and previous practice experiences that can support sufficiency practice performances. Therefore, it is important to look into how material arrangements can be reprogrammed in order to favour resource-light practices.
5. A strategy of reprogramming for sufficiency
Instead of advocating major transformations of infrastructures, which would entail massive resource and time demands, the strategy of reprogramming for sufficiency aims at shifting everyday practices to resource-light performances through strategically targeted reconfigurations of existing material arrangements. The interviewee narratives give several hints of such reprogramming strategies, including adjustments in both material and institutional arrangements.
In terms of material arrangements, a strategy of reprogramming could thus include examples such as improving the conditions for active mobility by ensuring well-lit and demarcated walking and biking paths, shielded from heavy traffic. This could be done with limited investments of labour and biophysical resources by modifying existing roads to shift the transport hierarchy, e.g. transforming existing roads into 2-1 roads with a narrow, single two-way lane and extra wide shoulders for cyclists and pedestrians in order to dedicate more of the existing road space to active mobility practices. Another example could be to shift motorised transport from private cars to public transport by transforming car lanes of main highways and superhighways into high-frequent public transport corridors such as bus rapid transit, as done with TransMilenio in Bogotá, Colombia. Even if it was originally implemented with a social justice purpose, and not for environmental reasons, it effectively changed the balance between private vehicles and public transport in Bogotá (Venter et al. 2018). Other reprogramming initiatives could be to promote better public mobility services by ensuring access and flexibility, e.g. on-demand services in sparsely populated areas, or electric bikes and cargo bikes as an alternative to cars on short to medium–long distances. Such initiatives could supplement the previous initiatives and be combined with limiting parking through fewer parking spaces, more expensive parking and longer distances from door to car.
A challenge might be that existing systems of provision in housing and transport appear more attuned to new and large construction projects rather than to renovation and small-scale changes. For instance, industrial production methods seem to dominate within construction businesses, one example being standard design houses. Denmark in recent years has seen many cases of demolition of existing houses followed by the construction of new buildings. This might be due to a proactive approach of actors from provision, but also a housing market that favours this economically (Mechlenborg & Jensen 2024). Also, new big infrastructure investments in car mobility receive more political attention than bicycle mobility, among others, because the national cost–benefit analyses do not include benefits related to cycling (Nielsen et al. 2018). Thus, existing institutional arrangements framing the economy, actors and professional practices can form an important challenge to achieve a general shift in planning and political thinking from ‘built (and replace)’ to reprogramming.
Complementary changes in institutional arrangements could support the reprogramming of material arrangements, such as promoting working from home to limit mobility needs while freeing up time and flexibility or remove tax deduction for commuting. Another type of institutional reprogramming could be to make financial and regulatory support schemes to strengthen local communities and support a reorientation towards the local.
While facilitating the diffusion of more resource-efficient practices, strategies for reprogramming should at the same time limit resource-intensive practices. This resembles a key point in Spurling & McMeekin’s (2014: 84) intervention strategy of practice substitutions, i.e. ‘discouraging current unsustainable practices and replacing them with existing or new alternatives’. More overall, the concept of reprogramming has several similarities to the ‘intervention framings’ developed by Spurling and McMeekin, and it can be seen as a sibling to their ideas. However, the reprogramming concept differs by emphasising the need to focus on material and institutional arrangements, and how these can be changed strategically through modifications and adjustments to produce significant impacts on the resource intensity of practices and their performances. Moreover, aligned with the principles of sufficiency and insights from social metabolism, reprogramming accentuates that to arrive at such practice substitutions, as little as possible new should be built or produced. Instead, existing material arrangements should be adjusted to support resource-light practices.
The concept of reprogramming also shares similarities to Akrich & Latour’s (1992) concept of programme as well as Akrich’s (1992) concept of scripts. Whereas these concepts are typically related to the design of specific artefacts, such as products or things (e.g. hotel keys as in Akrich and Latour’s classic example), the concept of reprogramming is directed towards broader material and institutional arrangements. By using a noun (programming) derived from a verb (to programme), it further emphasises the active and strategic element of changing these arrangements.
While some of the above-mentioned reprogramming initiatives can provide significant resource reductions within a relatively short time span, there are also long-term changes to be harvested from a reprogramming strategy, and these may gradually replace the initial short- and medium-term changes. For instance, bus rapid transit and limiting the number of cars, as short- and medium-termed initiatives to limit growth and reduce resource consumption within mobility, could in a long-term transition be replaced by the development of activity-integrated cities and neighbourhoods with limited need for travelling. The reprogramming of material arrangements can thus feed into long-term transitions towards a society based on principles of sufficiency.
The examples listed above are not new in themselves. Most are known policies for promoting sustainable alternatives to fossil-fuelled mobility. What is new is the conceptualisation of this as reprogramming within existing material arrangements—or within the ‘hardware’ of cities and infrastructures—and by also including the institutional arrangements, the ‘software’ of cities, in strategies towards sufficiency. With this reframing, it is the hope that this type of policy initiative can gain more interest and acceptance as compared with larger and more spectacular solutions at risk of being timewasting and too resource-demanding to the climate and biodiversity crises.
6. Conclusions
Over the last century and continuing to today, material arrangements within mobility have moved towards increasingly supporting car-based transport through highways, asphalt, petrol networks and stations, and the car itself. Simultaneously, institutional rhythms have moved towards being increasingly based on individual independence and the convenience from not being reliant on others in organising everyday activities. The latter can, for instance, be seen in the increasingly spatially dispersed family life with family members being engaged in individual networks and domains during the day (e.g. work, school, entertainment, sport) (Christensen 2009; Ling 2004). This historical shift in material and institutional arrangements has happened in tandem and with fossil fuels being a key enabler. It has thus taken a long time to establish today’s material and institutional arrangements, and due to the urgency of the present climate crisis, the time span to develop new arrangements has narrowed significantly. This is the premise of this paper and of the concept of reprogramming.
Reprogramming is not only an empirical–theoretical concept, but also a strategic policy-oriented concept. It represents both a way of thinking, e.g. in policymaking, and a way of designing, e.g. in urban planning. Strategies of reprogramming promote thorough changes in everyday practices towards sufficiency that are not tied up to resource- and labour-intensive investments in new infrastructures or new products. Furthermore, a key observation is that material arrangements and institutional rhythms are often shared by a multiplicity of practices. For instance, car-based infrastructures are enmeshed with a broad variety of practices, including holiday travelling, daily work-commuting, children’s care, grocery shopping, etc. Similarly, institutional rhythms can coordinate and synchronise a wide set of practices, such as the rhythm of working hours and working weeks, that orchestrate the timing of most everyday practices, including sleeping, shopping, picking up children from daycare, holidays and leisure time. The implication of this is that if it is possible to target strategically material arrangements connected to a broad variety of practices, and slightly modify them in ways that support less resource-intensive practice performances, it could have a transformative effect on a plenum of practices. This would be different from targeting specific practices, e.g. cooking, commuting or showering, as reprogramming of existing material arrangements would impact entire clusters of practices.
One important topic to consider in future studies is, of course, the political challenges that will be related to promoting strategies for reprogramming for sufficiency. It is obvious that already today, political initiatives aimed at limiting levels of resource use often conflict with the vested interests of powerful stakeholders (e.g. market actors in systems of provision) and public notions of what the ‘good life’ entails in terms of ‘rights’ to consumption (holiday travel, car use, meat consumption, etc.). It is not within the scope of this paper to answer the question of the political and practical difficulties that strategies of reprogramming might face, but it seems worth exploring new ways of engaging the public more generally in processes of deliberative democracy or in discussions of what the ‘good life within planetary limits’ would mean in practice and how to reach such a state of sufficiency. One example could be citizen-engaged workshops and assemblies on the development of personas and scenarios for future sufficient living, including discussions of needs and wants, such as those reported by Sahakian et al. (2023).
The uniqueness of reprogramming is that it connects the practice–theoretical perspective on resource consumption and how practices are (re)produced within material and institutional arrangements with the attention of social metabolism to societies’ biophysical flows and stocks. This invites new types of research and policy developments, such as developing methods to analyse and quantify the biophysical implications of different reprogramming strategies, which could inform policymakers and planners.