Goal 11: Sustainable Cities and Communities

SDG 11 aims to make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable. Browse books and journal articles relating to this SDG below and find out more on the UN Sustainable Development Goals website.
 

Goal 11: Sustainable Cities and Communities

You are looking at 1 - 10 of 2,664 items

This chapter examines the role of civil society in advancing sustainable welfare in the Swedish metropolitan cities of Stockholm, Gothenburg and Malmö. It views civil society as a space for collective action and potential transformation, where organisations, movements and activist networks strive for change. The chapter explores the collaboration and integration between civil society groups focused on environmental and welfare issues. Based on interviews with leaders and a survey of participants in environmental protests, the findings reveal an absence of a unifying master frame that bridges the environmental and welfare divides. This is primarily attributed to the particularistic nature of civil society organisations and their alignment with the siloed structure of local government, which separates policy areas. While inertia appears to dominate, the chapter highlights the emergence of a justice frame able to mobilise supporters from both environmental and welfare sectors, offering a potential path towards sustainable welfare.

Open access

This concluding chapter evaluates whether Swedish cities have successfully bridged the gap between environmental and welfare concerns in urban governance. Despite the disruptive pressures of climate change, the findings indicate that substantive transformative change has not yet occurred in the investigated cities. Environmental and welfare policy domains remain largely separate, with civil society organisations and public attitudes continuing to operate within a framework of differentiation rather than integration. While many results adhere to established pathways, the chapter highlights that patterns of inertia and emergence coexist. Actors actively push for new discourses and practices to integrate environmental and welfare concerns. However, the emergence of a sustainable welfare path remains contested, with expressions of denial, rejection and opposition to transformative efforts. Drawing on Polanyi’s concepts of movements and counter-movements, these tensions do not represent a failure of transformation but rather the clarification of two competing pathways for addressing the challenges and risks posed by climate change.

Open access

The introductory chapter outlines the core challenge of providing welfare within planetary boundaries, a pressing issue for cities and societies globally. It emphasises the growing recognition of climate change’s impact on welfare and social risks, forming the foundation for the book’s objectives. It explores patterns of inertia, emergence and transformation in Swedish urban governance and analyses if and to what extent Swedish cities have overcome the separation between welfare and environmental concerns and practices. Sweden, with its strong social democratic welfare legacy and widespread support for environmental policies, serves as a compelling case to examine factors that either promote or impede the integration of these domains. The chapter introduces the three cities central to the study – Stockholm, Gothenburg and Malmö – and outlines the three sites of urban governance explored in the book: local government, civil society and public attitudes. This sets the stage for the empirical investigation of sustainable welfare integration in Swedish urban governance.

Open access

This chapter examines how city governments and administrations integrate environmental and social concerns into urban governance. Utilising theories of policy integration, it explores the potential for eco-social integration in three major Swedish cities – Stockholm, Gothenburg and Malmö. The findings, based on interviews and document analysis, reveal limited integration between environmental and welfare domains. The siloed structure of public administration poses a significant barrier to cross-sectoral integration, compounded by resource constraints and the high degree of specialisation among experts. Despite this inertia, signs of emergence are observed in the form of urban experiments – short-term projects that challenge existing silo structures but generally do not establish lasting pathways for integration. The chapter recognises the potential impact of the sustainable development goals in reshaping urban governance, offering a path towards enhanced integration of eco-social policies.

Open access
Inertia, Emergence and Transformation in Swedish Cities

Available Open Access digitally under CC-BY-NC-ND licence.

Pathways to Sustainable Welfare critically examines how cities can address the dual challenges of climate change and sustainability while ensuring the welfare of their populations.

Focused on three Swedish cities, it explores the integration of environmental and welfare concerns in local policies, urban movements and public opinions. Based on theories of inertia, emergence and transformation, it identifies factors driving or obstructing sustainable welfare advancements.

This book is a crucial resource for scholars interested in sustainable transformation, urban governance and social policy. It offers frameworks and empirical evidence relevant to academics, policymakers and practitioners seeking to understand and engage in urban sustainable welfare development.

Open access

This chapter explores public attitudes towards sustainable welfare and the social dispositions that influence them based on a survey of urban and rural residents. The findings show that urban residents are generally more supportive of an eco-social agenda than their rural counterparts. Among the specific policies, working time reduction garners the most public support, followed by a wealth tax and a meat tax, while maximum income and basic income receive the least support. The analysis highlights that urban residents are more supportive of eco-social policies. Drawing on Bourdieu’s notion of habitus, the chapter examines the social dispositions that explain these varying attitudes. While many of these dispositions reflect inertia or emergence, one – ‘active sustainable welfare’ – is linked to a transformative outlook among parts of the public.

Open access

This chapter investigates varying conceptions of stability and change within sociology, political science and sustainability sciences. It synthesises key theoretical constructs such as dependency, niches, path entrepreneurs and tipping points to study pathways towards sustainable welfare. Building on these theories and concepts, the chapter proposes an analytical framework based on the conceptual distinctions between inertia, emergence and transformation. Inertia is framed as stability, while emergence reflects the creation of something new without a predefined trajectory. Transformation, on the other hand, involves the establishment of new pathways and the restructuring of institutions and practices to support them. The framework highlights the roles of discourses, actors and practices in shaping these dynamics, enabling a deeper empirical and analytical exploration of the integration between environmental and welfare domains and the mechanisms that facilitate or obstruct such integration.

Open access

This article explores the pedagogical affect of water in a place of water stress and illustrates its entanglement with dynamics of power and control. The current climate crisis is rendering already drought-prone regions ever drier, and it is often the already socially and economically disadvantaged who experience the most immediate impacts. In this article, we describe the experiences of residents in one township in South Africa’s Cape Flats to explore how water literacies have developed and been reinforced by a prolonged period of water scarcity. By analysing assemblages of images and accompanying texts produced through a PhotoVoice process undertaken by co-researchers in this settlement, we show how water’s presence as an always imminent absence has profound pedagogical impact. We also explore how water manages to escape and flow outside of attempts to control and constrain it. Finally, we speculate on the implications for place-based water literacies and the pedagogies at work in other places of water stress.

Open access

Chapter 7 presents the conclusions of the book. It highlights that many regulatory problems related to diversity in cities are usually addressed by reference to two main conceptions of toleration: toleration-as-neutrality and toleration-as-recognition. Each conception provides different responses to practical problems that arise in the spatial regulation of diversity. However, both of them, when mobilized to analyse the legal and political geography of pluralism, reveal some shortcomings. Against this background, the chapter proposes a revised version of the neutralist approach, namely ‘variegated inclusive neutralism’. After identifying the characteristics of this approach, the chapter explains that it entails a conception of cities as made up of ‘spatial spheres of toleration’ anchored primarily to different tenure regimes. Each sphere is legitimately characterized by different prerogatives of exclusion – and, thus, by a different degree of toleration. From this perspective, cities can be regarded (not only descriptively, but also from a normative standpoint, that is, with a focus on public policies and rules) as mosaics of complementary spheres; their pluralistic character is not so much the sum of each individual sphere’s degree of pluralism as it is, above all, the result of the harmonious relationship among them within an appropriate ethical and political framework.

Restricted access

Chapter 4 considers the issue of pluralism in private spaces. First, the case of homeowners associations (HOAs) is examined. It is argued that the answer to problems of regulating pluralism in this case should be sought in the light of two basic principles: the first is equality of public treatment between different types of HOAs (co-housing and gated communities, for example); the second is that of limiting public restrictions on the regulatory prerogatives of HOAs, in the belief that public regulation must seek to be indifferent to individual and collective conceptions of the good as long as they do not cause direct and tangible harm to others. The next part of the chapter focuses on shopping malls, where some problems of pluralism may emerge in connection with the restriction of certain behaviours, such as holding political demonstrations. After presenting various interpretations of this question, the chapter argues that certain restrictions on behaviour, although unpalatable to many of us, should be regarded as legitimate in malls. They are in accord with the idea that the pluralist city can be seen as a mosaic of complementary spaces in which functions that are not admitted in one tenure regime are fully enfranchised in another.

Restricted access