Motpol eller legitimeringskälla? - en studie av användningen av hållbarhetsbegreppet inom Malmö Stads fysiska planering

Sustainable development and sustainability is nowadays expected to be integrated in modern city planning and permeate the entire planning process. At the same time, sustainable development has an inherent vagueness, leading to a great diversity of interpretations of the meaning of this concept. In this thesis strong sustainability and ecological modernization are used as two different interpretations of sustainable development. Using these two interpretations, an analysis of the current use of the concept of sustainability within the city planning of Malmö is performed. The analysis shows that the interpretation of sustainable development in the city of Malmö can be deduced to ecological modernization and that sustainability is looked upon as one way to improve the attractiveness of the city. Investments to increase ecological and social sustainability must be legitimized as leading to a potential increase in economical sustainability (growth) and the focus of increasing the sustainability in the city has shifted from ecological aspects to economical aspects. The role of the planners has also become less authoritarian; building proprietors are more and more involved in the planning process and the role of the planner is described more as inspiring to a more sustainable exploitation, than demanding for one. Current interpretation of sustainability within the city planning of Malmö enables a planning that is very distant to the more radical changes in the physical design of the city that the term sustainability could aim for, with an interpretation more closely related to the ideas behind strong sustainability