Spaces of quiet sustainability: self-provisioning and sharing was a Czech Science Foundation project from 2019 to 2021 (19-10694S). It aimed to explore and understand of the functioning of networks created by social relationships facilitated by informal, household food production and sharing. The project team was interested in the values and motivations of participants in these networks. The researchers were also concerned with spatiality and material flows within these networks as well as with these processes’ economic and environmental effects. Empirically the project drew on interviews with sharing networks’ participants and surveys of food self-provisioning behaviours of the representative sample of population in Czechia and Austria.

Petr Daněk, Jan Vávra, Lucie Sovová and Petr Jehlička from current FoodRes project participated in the SQS project too as well as Alena Rýparová (Masaryk University), Miloslav Lapka and Roman Buchtele (both University of South Bohemia) (see People for details). The team’s objective was a theoretically informed interpretation of Central European situation where academically and socially fashionable market-based food initiatives co-exist with socially more widespread and economically and environmentally more significant networks of home food production and sharing. In addition to the better understanding of the function of the informal economy and the social relations it facilitates, the project team’s ultimate objective was to performatively contribute to the reframing of the economy as profoundly diverse, that is, consisting of both market and non-market relations.