The Organizing sustainable cities project aims at grasping how urban sustainable development becomes ‘translated’ as a concept and in practice through the networks and practice spheres of present-day city administrations. The project particularly focuses on the challenges faced by broad organizing ambitions, such as integrative strategies for sustainable urban development, when confronted with incongruent domains of practice that operate according to different protocols and in accordance with diverging values, norms and procedures.

The difficulty of implementing sustainable urban development policy has repeatedly been recognized as a key area of interest for the social sciences. By utilizing a, in the context, novel theoretical framework combined with a well-tested research approach, the Organizing Sustainable Cities-project has the potential to provide new insights into some of the reasons behind the challenges faced in the area of Sustainable urban development.The project particularly focuses on the challenges faced by broad organizing ambitions, such as integrative strategies for sustainable urban development, when confronted with incongruent domains of practice with diverging values, norms and procedures. By employing a praxiographic evolved grounded theory approach, the project gets up close to the practical implementation of policy through following how actors in different spheres of practice in city administrations translate sustainability into practice.The knowledge gained within the project would not only contribute to the development of the international research front, but also has the potential to be of direct applicability to policy practitioners working in the wide area of urban sustainable development. It would be of particular relevance to those working in the many mid-sized cities that up to now have received scant attention from the research community with regards to their ongoing ambitions to transition towards more sustainable urban futures.

Last modified

19 August 2020