Sustainable urban planning – what kinds of change do we need?

ABSTRACT

The approaches currently dominating sustainable urban planning are based on a paradigm which assumes that economic growth can be decoupled from economic degradation through smarter technological solutions and institutional reform within existing social structures. However, decoupling can only be partial. Environmental sustainability, therefore, requires that, sooner or later, growth in consumption and production must cease. Policies for combining environmental and social sustainability would be sharply at odds with key mechanisms inherent in the capitalist economy. Urban sustainability thus requires profound changes. On the ontological plane, planning theory must move away from anti-realist constructivism and hermeneuticism, towards realism. On the empirical plane, it is necessary to move away from disciplinary tunnel vision towards a critical realist version of interdisciplinarity, within key research fields such as housing research and transportation research. On the political plane, urban sustainability must move from growth to degrowth, from inequality to equality, and from capitalism to eco-socialism.

KEYWORDS:

• Sustainable urban planning
• ecological modernization
• degrowth
• ontology
• ideology
• capitalism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 I understand ‘development’ as denoting qualitative change that may or may not also include quantitative change, i.e., not as a synonym to growth and not referring to the notion of ‘development’ used in the discourse about ‘developed’ and ‘developing’ countries.

2 For example, by interpreting sustainable urban development to mean sustained growth in the local economy, as demonstrated, among others, in the Agenda 21 strategy of the Danish County of North Jutland (2004).

3 The Brundtland Commission (1987, 43) defined sustainable development as ‘development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. It contains within it two key concepts: the concept of “needs”, in particular the essential needs of the world’s poor, to which overriding priority should be given, and the idea of limitations imposed by the state of technology and social organization on the environment’s ability to meet present and future needs’. The Brundtland Commission’s definition of sustainable development should not be conflated with the Commission’s policy recommendations, which are arguably sometimes at odds with the definition. The Brundtland Commission’s definition of sustainable development is an ethical concept, based on ideas of welfare rights and distributional equity within and across generations. The policies recommended by the Brundtland Commission are based on a combination of normative and descriptive premises. The normative premises include those in the definition of sustainable development, but also some not mentioned in the definition (e.g., pro-growth and pro decentralized and market-based decision-making). A key descriptive premise to make policies appear consistent with the definition of sustainable development is the presupposition that full decoupling between growth and environmental unsustainability is possible.

4 For a discussion of relevant considerations in this regard, see Næss and Xue (2016).

5 For example, the well-known communicative planning theorist Patsy Healey (1996, 246) goes far in putting brackets around the expert knowledge of planners when writing about collaborative planning processes in a local community: ‘Knowledge is not preformulated but is specifically created anew in our communication through exchanging perceptions and understanding and through drawing on the stock of life experience and previously consolidated cultural and moral knowledge available to participants’.

6 Distinct from critical realism, Foucault and several other poststructuralist thinkers (such as Richard Rorty) reject judgmental rationalism, thus ending up with a radical knowledge relativism according to which no truth claim can be proved superior to others except by arguments that are essentially circular and question-begging (Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy 2021). In line with this, the poststructuralist planning theorist Flyvbjerg (2006) explicitly states that there is no privileged method or position from which the truth can be told, and that the ultimate test of validity claims is the public debate. Such knowledge relativism may legitimate a devaluation of research-based knowledge through disinformation by powerful interest groups controlling influential media. The formation of opinions in the U.S.A. on issues such as global warming and creationism versus Darwinism may serve as examples. An example closer to urban planning is the efforts by certain liberalist think-tanks in the U.S.A. to raise doubt about the existence of negative environmental and social impacts of urban sprawl, including a denial of any impacts worth mentioning of urban spatial structures on travel behaviour.

7 It is important to be aware that an alternative, non-capitalist society will not necessarily provide environmental sustainability, as evidenced from the huge environmental degradation in the previous state socialist countries. Economic growth was an important goal in these societies as well as in the market societies of the West (Townsend 1993). However, the incentive of each individual capitalist to accumulate surplus value, which makes up the main growth dynamic of capitalism, is absent in non-capitalist societies. In the latter type of society, the motivation for economic growth lies in the aim to increase the use value of production rather than to maximize exchange value.

8 This is the case about degrowth- or non-growth positions in general (Milankovic 2017; Büchs and Koch 2019; Foster 2011), and withing urban development, for example the idea of reversing urban sprawl (Bueno-Suarez and Coq-Huelva 2020).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Petter Næss

Petter Næss is Professor emeritus in Planning in Urban Regions at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences. He has contributed theoretically on urban sustainability, philosophy of science within the field of spatial planning, and methodology within infrastructure planning. A special interest in his research is relationships between urban spatial structures and travel, where he has made theoretical contributions concerning the causal status of the built environment. Based on critical realism, his studies on this topic differ from mainstream research by combining quantitative and qualitative methods, applying a multi-theoretical approach and explicitly emphasizing ontological and epistemological reflection.