Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: Sustainable transition and climate neutrality of cities requires profound changes and more radical planning practices, often outside the regular statutory planning systems. These practices are referred to in the literature as ‘soft planning’. The aim of this article is to analyze how cities with ambitious climate goals use soft planning practices as a means to work around the hard institutional frameworks to achieve climate neutrality. We conducted indepth interviews with planners in three European cities with high ambitions for sustainability and climate neutrality: Vienna, Oslo and Malmö. These three cities have adopted policies for climate neutrality by 2030 or 2040. Our analysis focuses on four features of soft planning: informality, voluntarism, complementarity and effectiveness. Our findings suggest that the importance of soft and hard planning varies over time making their relationship somewhat ambiguous. They also suggest that there seems to be a breaking point at which soft planning could turn into less effective processes.
Source: disP - The Planning Review
Authors: Sabrina Fredin, Dick Magnusson, Kristina Trygg
Institutions: Blekinge Institute of Technology, Linköping University
Language: English
Subfield: Global and Planetary Change
Field: Environmental Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W7087339343