Nordic Sustainable City Regional Planning from an Everyday Life Perspective (the NorLife project)
Diverse impacts of climate change and associated financial and social risks have become central to the so called "growth" agenda worldwide. Urban areas, through their continuous expansion and demands for more space and resources, are highly accountable in this regard. The depletion of natural resources and increasing global demands on goods and services are challenging our society, which has led to a greater awareness of the need to move towards a more sustainable, low carbon economy.
In this connection, climate change and "limits to growth" are now informing the spatial development debate and emerging as a new challenge for planners and politicians who were not trained to think in the context of this threat and are expected to develop plans for the existing built environment, new settlements and infrastructure in cities. This is forcing a re-assessment of how growth and development are envisioned and the extent and appraisal of planning interventions. Policy makers must support and promote a major shift towards 'green growth' as the new growth paradigm to reach sustainability, based on improved energy efficiency and radical changes in the energy systems.
However, green growth is a rather narrow concept and employs a reductionist approach as to what it really means for people's everyday practices. Human relationships with the spaces and places of everyday life, and, more specifically, how different aspects of age, gender and class affect relationships with the surrounding environment and the construction of cities, is often absent in green growth strategies. Social issues and groups in terms of class, gender, ethnicity, age and different cultural backgrounds are often reduced to simple variables or indicators in plans and analyses.
The objective of the present research project is to assess how Nordic sustainability discourses are envisioned at the Nordic city-regional level. Everyday life experiences (ways of living, producing and consuming) will be important units of analysis while analysing Nordic city-regional planning documents and interviews with key stakeholders. The outcome of the project will be a better understanding of how everyday life perspectives can contribute to sustainability discourses in planning, while also helping policy makers and spatial planners in Nordic city-regions to better integrate an everyday life perspective into planning practice.
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