Conflicting strategies towards sustainable heating at an urban junction of heat infrastructure and building standards

Approaches to ‘sustainability transitions’ stress the possibility of aligning actors around a shared vision of the future, e.g. at the scale of a city. Empirical accounts reveal how difficult such coordination often is due to contradictory views involved. How can we better understand related processes of searching and negotiation? What does this mean for the organization of decision making processes regarding long-term infrastructural change? We analyze a conflict which erupted in Freiburg, Germany when two strategies of reducing environmental impacts of space heating were to be applied in the Vauban ‘model district’: A) Efficient co-generation of heat and power (CHP) combined with district heating systems (DHS), and B) Reducing heat demand by low-energy designs and ambitious energy standards (‘passive house standard’). In order to understand the politics of infrastructure development, we unravel 1) enabling factors and driving forces of the conflict, 2) normative content of opposing viewpoints, 3) resources tapped into for settling the disagreement, and 4) the institutional setup of such decision making about energy policy priorities in the municipality. We reflect on implications of such a perspective on how policies and how governance arrangements should ideally be shaped and take a brief outlook on further research needed