The global sustainability agenda in urban planning: Insights from community visioning

The global agenda 2030 defines the creation of sustainable cities and communities as one of the major challenges of our times. Therefore, the topic is not only a prominent research issue, but also the focus of urban planning... [ view full abstract ]

The global agenda 2030 defines the creation of sustainable cities and communities as one of the major challenges of our times. Therefore, the topic is not only a prominent research issue, but also the focus of urban planning as well as local initiatives and activities. One critical key to success will be to align and create synergies between the various fields of action within an urban society and between activities on global, national and regional scale. Furthermore, it will be crucial to bring together science, city administrations, the civil society and the economic sector in order to reach comprehensive and coherent strategies across scales and fields of action. We are thus asking: How can the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) actively support local community visioning processes, and how can innovative, trans-sectorial modes of cooperation contribute to inducing transformations on urban scale?

Based on the results of a community visioning process in the city of Lueneburg, Germany, our analysis reveals the potentials of enhancing urban planning through collaborative transformation processes guided by the SDGs. Driven by the question “What does a sustainable city of Lueneburg look like, whose citizens actively engage in implementing the SDGs in awareness of their global responsibility?” 750 students, 30 scientists and over 200 actors from the city of Lueneburg developed visions for the year 2030 and beyond. Visions were developed for 25 different areas such as the future of mobility, smart cities and resilient infrastructure, but also regarding green spaces in the city, connections to the hinterland, or the future of participation, work life and housing. In a process that involved the broader public, these diverse fields were then integrated to formulate a shared vision. The synthesis process identified shared and diverging aspects of the different areas and included an in-depth systematic analysis of the inter-linkages between suggested solutions. The resulting shared set of visions serves as a robust resource to guide future urban planning that is concrete, science-based and agreed upon by many actors. It is also the basis to develop concrete implementation strategies such as zero food waste or aligning all resource-relevant activities spelled out in the visions in a scientifically-sound manner.

We discuss the relevance and potentials of such an approach towards inducing sustainability transformations on local level mainly with regards to the following issues:

(i) The SDGs fulfilled various functions throughout the process, namely framing, normative and procedural functions.

(ii) The process allowed for an active engagement with the relation of global and local knowledge and goal-setting, e.g., making sense of global goals on local level, or identifying blind spots and differences in priority-setting.

(iii) The cooperative approach brought about results that can meaningfully complement established scientific concepts, tools and methods (such as the urban metabolism, material flow analysis and sustainability assessments of the built environment) by designing local solutions in a global context based on normative shared visions in a process of co-creating knowledge.