Between Ambition and Instrument: Land Allocation, Social Mixing and the Operationalisation of Social Sustainability in Swedish Urban Planning : A Comparative Case Study in Uppsala

Sammanfattning

This research study investigated how social sustainability and segregation are conceptualised and understood in Rosendal and Gottsunda, residential neighbourhoods in Uppsala, Sweden. The study deployed critical discourse analysis of planning documents and thematic analysis of semi-structured expert interviews with planning officials at Uppsala municipality to answer the questions of how social sustainability and segregation are framed and operationalised in residential areas with differing planning paradigms. A further question examined how the municipality used planning instruments to embed social sustainability ambitions in the planning process, with a focus on housing provision and social mixing as a segregation mitigation policy. The research has demonstrated that the operationalisation and framing of social sustainability and segregation differ across the planning documents, with segregation being absent in the Rosendal documents. The document analysis has shown that the constraints of the detailed development plan limit the municipalities' capacity to influence social sustainability, and the interviews have demonstrated that land allocation is the most relevant tool for integrating social ambitions into the planning process in regard to tenure type mixing.