Motpol eller legitimeringskälla? - en studie av användningen av hållbarhetsbegreppet inom Malmö Stads fysiska planering
Sustainable development and sustainability is nowadays expected to be integratedin modern city planning and permeate the entire planning process. At the sametime, sustainable development has an inherent vagueness, leading to a greatdiversity of interpretations of the meaning of this concept. In this thesis strongsustainability and ecological modernization are used as two different interpretationsof sustainable development. Using these two interpretations, an analysis of thecurrent use of the concept of sustainability within the city planning of Malmö isperformed. The analysis shows that the interpretation of sustainable development inthe city of Malmö can be deduced to ecological modernization and thatsustainability is looked upon as one way to improve the attractiveness of the city.Investments to increase ecological and social sustainability must be legitimized asleading to a potential increase in economical sustainability (growth) and the focusof increasing the sustainability in the city has shifted from ecological aspects toeconomical aspects. The role of the planners has also become less authoritarian;building proprietors are more and more involved in the planning process and therole of the planner is described more as inspiring to a more sustainable exploitation,than demanding for one. Current interpretation of sustainability within the cityplanning of Malmö enables a planning that is very distant to the more radicalchanges 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.