Urban sustainability responsibilities of the European planning profession in the next decades

ABSTRACT

Presently dominant urban planning strategies and discourses do not sufficiently address the crises of climate change, loss of nature and unjust inequality globally and nationally. The planning profession should interpret what it would imply for urban and regional development to effectively counteract these crises, reflect on possibilities and hindrances for meeting these challenges under current societal conditions, and try to raise a counter-discourse in opposition to mainstream planning approaches. Scenarios and alliance-building with stakeholders supporting sustainable transformation can be helpful for this purpose. Planning research should place stronger emphasis on investigating consequences of European urban and regional development for environmental sustainability and social justice not only locally but also at a wider geographical scale including the Global South. There is a need for strengthened regional planning across local administrative boundaries in urban regions, and for binding regulations promoting sustainability at a national, European, and global scale. Planners should, however, not be naïve about the possibilities for sustainability planning under present societal conditions. The profession should therefore also explore pathways for societal transformations necessary for overcoming present barriers to sustainable spatial planning.

KEYWORDS:

• Urban sustainability
• planning responsibilities
• climate crisis
• nature crisis
• inequality crisis

1. The challenges

Current development in European cities contributes to aggravating a climate crisis, a nature crisis, and an inequality crisis globally and nationally. Time is running out if we are to keep the rise in global temperature below the limit set in the Paris agreement of 2015 (IPCC 2019, 2021). We are heading a warming of 2.6 degrees if the world nations’ current plans for climate change mitigation are implemented – and so far, most countries are lagging far behind implementing these plans. Rapid loss of biodiversity and biologically productive areas threatens to create unprecedented ecological collapses and hunger (FAO 2019; IPBES 2019). Loss of natural areas and biodiversity also makes it even more difficult to limit climate change and adapt to the future climatic conditions.

In addition to the interrelated climate, nature and food supply crises, there are ethically indefensible inequalities between affluent and poor countries and within each country. Giving overriding priority to the essential needs of the world’s poor, as stated in the Brundtland Commission’s (1987, 43) definition of sustainable development, implies an imperative to reduce these inequalities. According to a recent report by the World Inequality Lab, with the famous French economist Thomas Piketty as one of its authors, ‘the between-countries economic inequalities remain particularly high despite the emerging world catching up somewhat over the past four decades’. (Chancel et al. 2022, 28). Although China and some other non-OECD countries have experienced rapidly rising average income levels, this is not the typical pattern of the Global South, and not at all in Africa. Data from the International Monetary Fund show that one half of the world’s countries have an affluence level lower than one-fourth of the level of the European Union and less than one-fifth of that of Norway (IMF 2022), where disposable real income per capita is expected to be 50% higher in 2060 than in 2020 (Ministry of Finance 2021, 72). Bringing all nations up to Norway’s (and similar rich countries’) projected future affluence level would require huge growth not only in the countries with GDP per capita lower than one-fourth of that of the EU, but also in the other countries ranked below Norway in GDP. Even with very optimistic beliefs in the progress and proliferation of ‘green growth’ (OECD 2011, 2023) and ‘green’ technologies, such economic growth could hardly be consistent with environmental sustainability.

Moreover, the inequality within most countries has grown considerably during this period and has reached a historic high level (Chancel et al. 2022). At present, ‘global inequalities are close to the levels of the early twentieth century, at the peak of Western imperialism’ (Chancel et al. 2022, 11). The increasing within-country inequality applies not only to countries with weak redistributive institutions such as USA, but also countries such as the European Nordic ones (Grunfelder 2020; Aaberge et al. 2021; NHO 2018, 151–170), where the welfare state that was built up during the postwar period until around 1980 has been partly and gradually dismantled in recent decades.

Although more resource-efficient technologies can reduce the environmental impacts per unit produced or consumed of a commodity, such ‘decoupling’ is at best only partial, not absolute (Jackson 2017; Vadén et al. 2020), thus only postponing the time at which continuous growth results in catastrophic climate change, losses of biodiversity, and reduced food security. This becomes even more clear if indirect and non-local impacts such as the imbued energy use and extraction impacts of commodities and raw materials imported to Europe from the Global South are considered in addition to the direct and local environmental load (Tukker, Pollitt, and Henkemans 2020), and a full range of impact categories is included instead of measuring only one or a few indicators such as CO₂ emissions. Increased consumption levels in Europe and other wealthy regions of the Global North represent energy and carbon emissions that increase or preserve global inequalities in greenhouse gas emissions, given a ‘ceiling’ on the total global emissions in accordance with international climate mitigation and nature protection objectives and agreements. Overconsumption in the global north could thus be seen as a hindrance for economic development in the global south. However, perspectives of decolonial environmental justice (Álvarez and Coolsaet 2020) are largely absent in European discourses on sustainable urban planning.

2. Questioning growth assumptions in planning

Over the more than 35 years since Brundtland Commission put the notion of ‘sustainable development’ on the agenda, sustainable urban development has been an important aim among urban planners and policymakers. However, current urban planning strategies and discourses on urban development do not sufficiently address the above-mentioned challenges. Growth in the urban building stock and infrastructure is rarely questioned (Xue 2022), despite the environmental direct and indirect impacts of such growth and its role in perpetuating global inequalities.

Urban development represents transactions with nature that that are far from environmentally neutral. Construction of buildings and various kinds of infrastructure require land, materials and energy and have environmental impacts (notably energy use and related emissions) when used. Not the least, transportation within cities and city regions has considerable environmental effects. The same applies to the transport of people, materials and commodities between the city region and other parts of the globe.

A key feature of the prevailing normative program for sustainable development policies, ecological modernization, is that it insists that it is possible to ‘decouple’ growth in production and consumption from negative environmental impacts through smarter, more resource-efficient technologies. In the context of urban planning, densification is an example of such a ‘smart technology’, since it entails considerably lower conversion of non-developed land, lower dependence on car travel and reduced greenhouse gas emissions, compared to outward urban expansion (Næss et al. 2019; Bibri, Krogstie, and Kärrholm 2020).

However, there are limitations to decoupling between growth and negative environmental impacts, and this also applies to urban densification as a sustainability strategy (Næss et al. 2019). The ‘decoupling’ between growth and environmental impacts is thus only partial. For one thing, the increase in the size of the building stock requires the consumption of more construction materials and more energy for space heating, cooling etc. and subsequent refurbishing, as mentioned above. In addition, there are increasing tensions between global benefits and local effects, and currently pursued densification policies have come under attack for resulting in reduced neighbourhood and housing qualities, insecurity, sadness and loss of place identity (Pont et al. 2021; Skrede and Andersen 2022). Moreover, instead of making cities more inclusive to low-income groups, as has sometimes been claimed (Monroy et al. 2020), densification tends – under neoliberal conditions – to increase housing unaffordability and gentrification, compared to sprawl (Miles 2012; Cavicchia 2021). Such negative impacts of current densification processes may cause the pendulum starting to swing back again – back from the compact city strategy toward a renewed acceptance of outward urban expansion, often promoted as ‘polycentric urban development’ (Schmitt et al. 2015; Danish Business Authority 2017, Ministry of Transport 2013; Municipality of Oslo/County of Akershus 2015; Granquist, Sarjamo, and Mäntysalo 2019).

However, for sustainable urban planning, recent years’ increased focus on neighbourhood-scale and responsiveness to local stakeholders’ inputs – although also of relevance – should not block the sight of the larger and more material crises. A return to outward urban expansion would not be an adequate response to the problems of the compact city strategy but would increase the total negative environmental impacts considerably and eventually also harm local amenities (e.g. because of the need for more road building and parking space). The environmental critique of urban densification therefore lacks credibility unless it also attacks the growth in the building stock and infrastructure. Otherwise, it will only imply that environmental impacts are moved to somewhere else where they will likely be even larger in terms of climate impacts, loss of nature, loss of soil for food production, and consumption of raw material for infrastructure construction.

The building stock size per capita (Euroconstruct 2018) and the mobility level in affluent European cities is arguably already higher than what could be realized globally without enormous negative environmental impacts (Næss and Xue 2016). Given that planetary limits to growth in consumption exist, further per capita growth in building stock and mobility in affluent European cities is environmentally unsustainable and inconsistent with global solidarity. At the same time, some inhabitants in European cities live in small and low-standard dwellings, and some also suffer from mobility and energy deprivation. Selective standard improvement for such groups should take place. For this to happen without increasing the overall per capita size of the building stock, the consumption of built environment attributes among the remaining inhabitants, and particularly the high-consumptive upper-class and upper middle-class groups, should be reduced. (And even more so if, as might be necessary, shrinking per capita size to avoid an increase in its absolute size.)

There is thus a need to combine resource-efficient urban development principles with a halt in, or even reversal of, the per capita growth in building stock, combined with radical redistribution of floor space and urban space. Planning for degrowth combined with radical redistribution of housing standards, mobility opportunities and urban amenities should therefore be on European urban planners’ agenda. Minimum norms (to secure decent dwellings, mobility opportunities etc. for all) as well as maximum norms (to prevent overconsumption) should be part of planners’ toolbox for such planning.

Here, one might of course object that the Brundtland Commission’s definition of sustainable development is perhaps not what European planners and politicians want to pursue. However, if they did, changing to a very different pathway in urban development would be necessary. In my opinion, sustainability-oriented planning scholars and practitioners have a responsibility for contributing to attitude changes in politics and society at large enabling such transition.

3. Sustainability responsibilities of planning scholars and practitioners

3.1. Responsibilities of planning scholars

With some exceptions (e.g. Albrechts 2004, 2015; Yiftachel 2006), the academic discussion within the spatial planning discipline has for many years been remarkably uninterested in the contents and consequences of plans (Fainstein 2010; Strand and Næss 2017). According to Yiftachel and Huxley (2000), a detachment of planning theories from the actual subject areas was a common trait of much of planning literature around the turn of the millennium. This still seems to be largely the case, for example judged from the list of the most cited recent articles in one of the leading planning theory journals (Planning Theory 2023). In planning theory, the ‘communicative turn’, which emerged around the time when European Planning Studies was first established, was linked to larger societal, academic and cultural trends, with links to pluralism, relativism and postmodernism. Although being subject to attacks by some planning scholars for being ‘power blind’ (Flyvbjerg and Richardson 2002; Yiftachel and Huxley 2000) or functioning as a tool for neoliberalism (Bengs 2005), communicative planning is arguably still the hegemonic normative planning theory among planning academics.

Communicative planning theories generally focus on planning processes rather than on the contents and consequences of the strategies promoted in spatial planning (Fainstein 2010; Healey 1996; Albrechts 2015). In communicative (and incremental) planning theories, planners’ role is depicted as a mediator and process coordinator rather than as an expert on means-ends rationality (which the concern for consequences of plans is actually about). According to Bengs (2005), communicative planning theories also often oppose the idea of a public interest. If there are no public concerns that planning should try to support through its interventions, there will be little need for public planning to focus on consequences, except indirectly through the preferences of stakeholders. Such focus on process rather than content is consistent with the traditional liberalist focus on decision-making processes rather than the effects of decisions (Fainstein 2010).

For a long time, dominant procedural planning theories have also favoured a high degree of local-level decision-making (Friedmann 1973; Purcell 2006) and placed ‘local knowledge’ on more or less equal footing as ‘expert knowledge’ (Healey 1996). However, many of the sustainability challenges are about the negative consequences of local actions reaching far beyond the local sphere. As argued by Naustdalslid (1992), environmental problems can be categorised into four types depending on where they are generated and where their consequences are manifest. Local autonomy in decision-making should, according to Naustdalslid, be limited to the category of problems that are generated locally and with consequences occurring (mainly) within the local territory. For the remaining three categories (locally generated problems with consequences beyond the local territory, local problems generated (mainly) from activities outside the local territory, and supra-local problems generated from diffuse sources across territorial borders), some sort of supra-local influence (or even control) on local decision-making should exist.

As I have argued elsewhere (Næss 2001; Strand and Næss 2017), Naustdalslid’s arguments form a logical extension of the arguments put forth by Klosterman (1985) about the need for public planning in market societies. Klosterman’s arguments for interventions into individual freedom of action in the form of public planning emphasize the need to correct ‘market failures’ caused by the action of individual market agents. However, a similar logic can be applied to the need for supra-local intervention to counteract negative external effects of the actions of separate municipalities. Given the weak role of regional spatial planning (apart from certain types of infrastructure, such as highways and railroads) in many European countries (Galland 2012; Simeonova et al. 2018), there is a need for stronger and much more binding land use planning at a regional scale in urban regions and metropolitan areas. Likewise, there is a need for binding international regulations to protect ‘global commons’ such as biodiversity, natural ecosystem capacity and climate. In Europe, the EU could perhaps play such a role, although EU’s overall orientation toward economic growth and the market liberalism embodied in its constitution (the four market freedoms) would likely be an obstacle. International regulations would also be required for establishing the ‘new international economic order’ discussed by the United Nations in the 1970s (UN 1974), which would arguably be necessary for meeting the imperative of the Brundtland Commission (1987, 43) of giving overriding priority to the needs of the world’s poor. Within each European country, national-scale planning and regulations would be required to implement international sustainability-motivated agreements as well as to secure the welfare of disadvantaged population groups in a situation where the general level of consumption among its inhabitants cannot any longer, due to ecological constraints and international commitments, continue to increase.

A more relational perspective (Fuchs, Brown, and Rounsevell 2020) would be required in planning research, enabling the planners to be aware of sustainability-relevant dependencies of the construction and use of local built environments and infrastructure on resource inputs from other parts of the world, as well as sustainability-relevant consequences of local built environment and infrastructure development beyond the local community. A relevant empirical source for the former is a database offered by the European Union (Ciuta and Ciupagea 2019).

Such increased awareness among planners would also entail educational implications. For one thing, it would be necessary to strengthen planners’ knowledge about the likely sustainability-relevant impacts of different built environment and infrastructure solutions in different contexts. As mentioned above, knowledge of the material transactions of cities and urban regions with nature and the environment has for several decades been downplayed within the academic community of planners, and largely also among planning practitioners, at least when it comes to consequences beyond the local territory. Notably, a strengthened interdisciplinary integration of knowledge – and subsequently policies- across different sub-fields of planning is crucial. For example, within housing policy, there is a need for better integration of the environmental and the social welfare agenda (Næss and Xue 2016; Mete and Xue 2021).

3.2. Responsibilities in planning practice

Whereas establishing international sustainability-motivated binding regulation falls beyond the responsibility of the spatial planners of a given country, strengthened regional and national-scale planning would require planners to become more aware of non-local consequences of the chosen solutions for land use and the development of the built environment. Indeed, in a society where most actors confine debates on urban policies to the local, immediately visible and short-term issues, planners have a particular responsibility to speak to politicians and the public about long-term, non-local and indirect impacts in addition to the immediate ones. This responsibility does not mean that the external and long-term effects of actions matter more than the direct and immediate ones. However, as argued by Klosterman (1985), taking care of common and long-term interests is particularly important from a political point of view, because only the authorities can ensure that these issues are considered in the decisions. Planners in rich countries should therefore raise awareness about the need for changing toward degrowth planning (Xue and Keblowski 2022; Xue 2022), accompanied with radical redistribution within each country, to conform with sustainable development as defined by the Brundtland Commission (1987, 43). This should be done by informing politicians and the public at large about environmental and equity impacts of urban development beyond the immediate ones. Such general awareness-raising is probably necessary to obtain popular understanding of and political backing for urban planning in accordance with sustainable development as defined by the Brundtland Commission (1987, 43).

Corresponding to the need for interdisciplinary integration of knowledge, strengthened cross-sectoral cooperation should take place in planning practice. Such cross-sectoral integration is still often too weak. The longtime called-for coordination of land use and transport policies is largely absent in many urban regions, at least seen from a sustainability perspective. Typical examples of this are the continual road capacity increase taking place in many urban regions despite policy objectives of curbing car driving (Ministry of Transport (Norway) 2021), and a belief that a transition to electric cars can make growth in car driving in urban regions sustainable (Danish Infrastructure Commission 2006; Driscoll et al. 2012), thus disregarding the many other negative impacts of a car-oriented development (including the loss of nature, biodiversity and farmland to give way for more and wider roads and urban sprawl induced by increased road capacity). Moreover, there are tendencies that policies for climate change mitigation and adaptation may counteract each other, for example when urban densification takes place in flood-prone areas without sufficient measures to make the new neighbourhoods flood resilient, or when urban dispersal is recommended as a strategy for counteracting the ‘urban heat island’ and for adapting to heavier precipitation by reducing the concentration of non-permeable urban surfaces.

The above-mentioned conflicts between sector-based urban policies are still not only due to lack of interdisciplinary knowledge integration or cross-sector policy integration. Even with the best imaginable integration of knowledge and policies, there are tensions between different sustainability concerns, and these tensions tend to become more serious the more is being built. With a high growth in the building stock and technical infrastructure, urban densification aiming to protect the global environment, farmland and biodiversity will increasingly conflict with the protection of local environmental qualities (Næss, Saglie, and Richardson 2020).

3.3. Sustainability planning in the face of counteracting driving forces

As already mentioned above: to promote sustainable urban development in affluent countries, land-efficient urban development, restrictions on urban motoring combined with improved public transit and conditions for non-motorized travel, and affordable housing development geared toward the needs of low-income groups should be combined with a halt in, or even reversal of, the per capita growth of the building stock. Such policies are far from the actual prioritizations in European urban development. Major driving forces in urban development pull in other directions (see below). Planners need better knowledge about such driving forces. Otherwise, the proposals of sustainability-oriented planners are likely to be dismissed as naïve and utopian. Knowledge about urban driving forces can enable planners to navigate in a better way between the opportunities and constraints that make up the context-dependent conditions for sustainability progress. Since the urban driving forces are often closely linked with major driving forces for societal development at large, planners also need to be knowledgeable about the latter. Political economy (notably its eco-Marxist/ecosocialist branch), political ecology and related disciplines are relevant sources of such knowledge.

Whereas regional and national authorities may recognize the need for supra-local regulations to counteract the tendency of local authorities of sacrificing environmental concerns for the construction of buildings and infrastructures to attract inward investments, employment and local growth, national and regional authorities are less likely initiators of policies for limiting the general level of consumption. Top-down regulations may be effective in pursuing more resource-efficient ways of increasing the building stock, infrastructure and accessibility to relevant facilities, but are under current societal conditions much less likely to counteract the drive toward ever-increasing levels of consumption. The prevailing capitalist economic system in European countries as well as in most other countries of the world is one that is geared toward growth and tends to run into crises and increased unemployment in the absence of economic growth. However, planners, and especially planning academics, should not for this reason abstain for pointing at the contradictions between economic growth and environmental sustainability. Planning is a future-oriented profession, and planners therefore are – or at least should be – more aware of long-term consequences of current trends of development than most other professionals, let alone the public at large. If planners are aware that ‘business as usual’ in urban and regional development is at odds with sustainability requirement and adopted environmental and welfare objectives, they have an ethical responsibility to speak out about these realities. From where should such awareness come, if not from the planners? Such efforts would be a bottom-up process rather than top-down, as it would need to engage local citizens, professionals and politicians (but also target audiences at a national-scale).

For one thing, planners have a responsibility to inform politicians about the likely consequences of different proposed solutions, seen in the light of important criteria for a sustainable development. Planners and planning scholars should also give such information to the citizens, for example through newspaper feature articles, public meetings and social media. Planners should also try to formulate plan alternatives consistent with sustainable development and try to ignite debates about such alternatives among politicians, different sectors of the administration and the public at large.

It would be like trotting up an escalator that rolls the other way, one might say. This is still not a good enough reason for giving up in advance. Planning academics and practitioners should make an attempt and see how far it is possible to get. Sustainability-oriented planners should try to create planning processes that can generate more debate about what values and interests we really want to promote. Scenarios could be a relevant method to illustrate future situations resulting from a continuation of current priorities, alternative scenarios depicting sustainable futures, and pathways toward sustainable scenarios through backcasting (Mete 2022). Moreover, planners should counter the advocacy planning on behalf of the affluent by employing Forester’s (1980) strategies to reduce distorting communication and by being a voice for those who cannot so easily be heard (the poor, the future generations). Moreover, planners should try to foster alliance-building (Flyvbjerg 1994; Iveson 2013) in support of a genuinely sustainable urban and regional development among population groups and stakeholders who do not have vested interests in the most environmentally harmful enterprises and sectors. Open and well-informed planning dialogues within such alliances could facilitate the emergence of common strategies for ecological sustainability and social justice and increase the general support in society of such strategies.

4. Concluding remarks

At the 30th congress of the Association of European Schools of Planning (AESOP) in Gothenburg in 2018, the Swedish planning scholar Jonathan Metzger ran a roundtable session raising the question: Is urban sustainability going out of fashion? The background was a long-lasting tendency among influential actors of watering down the understanding of the concept of sustainable development, where a prevailing interpretation today is that concerns about ‘planet, people and profit’ must be balanced against each other if the development is to be sustainable. However, as mentioned in the introductory section, the Brundtland Commission’s (1987, 43) definition of sustainable development is much more radical than that (although their report Our Common Future included several policy recommendations that would hardly contribute to sustainable development as understood in their definition). Instead of abandoning the concept of urban sustainability, we need a new paradigm for urban sustainable development (as well as for sustainable development in general) that is not committed to (per capita) growth in production and consumption in wealthy countries. We thus need to reclaim the implicit radicalness of the concept of sustainable development as defined by the Brundtland Commission (1987, 43).

European planning scholars should put stronger efforts into investigating the role of urban development in European cities and city regions in aggravating the climate crisis, the nature crisis, and the inequality crisis globally and nationally, and the driving forces behind such unsustainable outcomes. Perspectives of decolonial environmental justice should be adopted and the impacts of overconsumption in the Global North as a hindrance for development in the Global South should be acknowledged. Planning scholars should also envisage planning systems and procedural planning models that can counteract the above-mentioned crises and explore transformative strategies for removing structural barriers against urban sustainability. Curricula in planning education should be reformed accordingly.

Planning practice needs to widen its scope to incorporate non-local sustainability impacts as well as the local ones. Regional planning should be significantly strengthened to avoid environmentally and socially harmful competition for inward investment between local authorities in urban regions. Binding national and international regulations would probably also be needed if a reduction of inequalities between the Global North and the Global South is to take place within planetary environmental limits. Within their own planning jurisdictions, planners should raise public and political awareness about sustainability challenges in urban development through various procedural tactics, including scenarios and alliance-building with stakeholders supporting sustainable transformation.

However, a planning agenda along these lines would be up against powerful actors and structural forces. The planning profession should not be naïve about this but work out astute strategies to overcome short-term as well as more fundamental barriers. Today, radical policies and measures necessary for a transition to sustainable development are often deemed unrealistic and impossible. This situation calls for transformative societal change, where social structures, practices and cultures currently blocking sustainability transitions should be superseded with conditions enabling environmentally and socially sustainable pathways.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.