Abstract
Urban sustainability has been used to cover multiple aspects of urban development. Terms related to sustainability have been generously used to advance ubiquitous and hard-to-measure targets not least in response to global and national sustainable development (SD) targets. However, ad-hoc and governed urbanization processes differ. In addition to different development pathways, local differences in interpretation of sustainability exist. This renders a global urban sustainability discourse disconnected from local practice. In this paper we focus on the Nordic cities, combining what is known about the similarities of the cities and societies, their recent development and highlights. Comparing with the global sustainability discourse spearheaded by the UN development goals (SDGs) we analyze the potential links in Nordic urban development to the global aims, as well as the local action taken via ex-ante review and assessment. With increasing demands for transformative change in urban planning and other institutions due to environmental, social and economic challenges, we demonstrate where strengthening the urban sustainability agenda is particularly needed. Findings show surprisingly little focus on socially just and cross-thematic development pre-SDGs, while it is expected that the dominant technocratic focus will give way to these other aspects necessary to address sustainability under the current SDG framework.
Highlights
The notion of sustainability in the urban realm stems from the awareness that the predominant paradigm of urban development, including the social and economic, is endangering the environment and implies social decay, ecological and economic deprivation
We argue that the concept of sustainable development (SD) coined in the late 1980s by the Brudtland (1987) commission through Agenda 21 to the current UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development including the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), is
During the search for relevance, we found that compared to the limited sources on the specific case of Nordic urban sustainability, there existed a vast amount of research on the global overview of what constitutes sustainable cities
Summary
The notion of sustainability in the urban realm stems from the awareness that the predominant paradigm of urban development, including the social and economic, is endangering the environment and implies social decay, ecological and economic deprivation. A transformation within the urban realm is necessary for cities to meet the requirements of a sustainable framework of development and progress. We adopt the viewpoint of Bibri and Krogstie [2] on sustainability, whereby “Sustainability epitomizes a holistic, long-term perspective based on the premise of consciously and incessantly going with the grain of nature and providing the conditions for deploying the frameworks necessary for its operationalization and its translation into practices in a more intelligent way in order to reach a sustainable society”. Urban Sci. 2019, 3, 69 prevalent in, and suited for the context of the development of (Nordic) cities. The SDGs introduced in are starting to be operationalized in different urban contexts [3]
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