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The Vjosa, a relatively well-known river of South East Europe, has been a subject of numerous attempts of infrastructural interventions such as the construction of hydropower plants for more than a decade. This “pearl” of the Blue Heart of Europe, as the river is often called by various activists, scientists and media, is now also referred to as a “dynamic equilibrium” and “geological continuum”. The article explores the dynamic and uneven character of the Vjosa, which is embodied in the lives of its people as much as their lives are spatialized in its riverine environments. While activists, scientists, and the media praise the Vjosa’s continuous dynamism, local people have an ambivalent relationship to it. On the one hand, they fear the Vjosa’s “wild” character, as it floods their fields and “eats up” their soil, whereas, on the other, they appreciate its vitality because it provides their fields with water and minerals. By delving into this ambiguous nature of the Vjosa, this article seeks to rethink the meaning of dynamics, continuity, stability, fixity, and rupture at the brink of the modern quest for control over changing environments. By intersecting different scales—social, geographical, hydrological, historical, political, and economic—it explores the mutuality of entanglements, disentanglements, and transformations that configure the Vjosa’s riverine environments. We argue that the dynamic, wild, and ambiguous nature of the Vjosa is part of the structural continuity or so-called “landscape structure” that seeks to resist the contemporary quest for fixity, stability, and control.

This special issue delves into the local worlds of Svalbard, Estonia, Slovenia, Serbia and Albania and attests to different ways of knowing, experiencing, and living with the changing environments. Unlike many contemporary studies of environmental change, which focus on the realm of the environment undergoing unprecedented changes, this issue focuses on the processes of changes taking place in particular environments. It asks how these changes evolve, what they mean, and how people make sense of them in their daily lives. By exploring their spatial and temporal realms and the different scales at which they proliferate, this issue emphasizes the processes of changes in relation to environments and not just the other way around. Rather than rashly clinging to crisis or apocalyptic scenarios, it is important to pause and rethink the meanings, rhythms, affects, and effects of these changes in particular local worlds.

This introduction to a special issue offers a set of nuanced conceptualizations and explanations into what happens when the official and administrative conceptualizations of the historical and monumental past meet with the local histories, intimate remembrances and landmarks of life.

Epilogue to a book about changing concepts of place, and concepts of mobility and immobility. Non