Between utopias and everyday practices: ecopreneurs and new urban economies in Bologna

This article examines how New Urban Economies (NUEs) contribute to, and reveal the contradictions of, socio-ecological transition in Italian cities, using Bologna as a case study. It brings together three strands of research that are usually treated separately: studies of distinctive and environmentally oriented consumption practices; sustainable entrepreneurship research combining supply-side and demand-side explanations; and scholarship on temporality, prefiguration, and everyday utopias. Integrating these perspectives allows us to shift attention from macro-level sustainability indicators to the micro-relational and organizational practices through which socio-ecological change is interpreted, negotiated, and enacted. NUEs are defined as innovative market-based activities that systematically combine economic viability with environmental and social sustainability. Their originality lies not simply in o􀀀ering green products or services, but in experimenting with alternative ways of organizing economic relations within the urban context. The empirical analysis draws on 23 semi-structured interviews with founders of small businesses in the food and clothing sectors. Three main findings emerge. First, becoming an ecopreneur often represents a biographical turning point through which individuals seek coherence between critical consumption practices, personal values, professional aspirations, and concerns about climate change and social justice. Second, doing ecopreneurship involves the continuous negotiation of sustainability in everyday organizational choices, particularly in supplier selection and relationships with employees and customers. Third, the transformative potential of ecopreneurship does not lie in eliminating contradictions or producing immediate systemic change, but in turning such contradictions into sites of practical experimentation. The article argues that NUEs can be understood as everyday utopias: situated micro-scale economic experiments that connect past experiences, present constraints, and imagined futures. Rather than attributing heroic agency to individual entrepreneurs, it shows how NUEs make alternative economic relations locally practicable while exposing the structural limits, uneven responsibilities, and institutional weaknesses of urban socio-ecological transition in contemporary Italian cities.