Norra Sorgenfri Planned, Populated and Problematised: The role of social sustainability in urban renewal

In this project we brought together researchers from four disciplines at three universities, to study how social sustainability takes shape through the redevelopment of Norra Sorgenfri. In this industrial area close to Malmö’s city centre, the vision is to create a residential neighbourhood where attractive and safe public spaces should both enhance life within the area, and contribute to enhancing mobility between Malmö’s deprived peripheries and the inner city.

In scrutinising this attempt to create a neighbourhood that should mend a segregated city we focused on what work social sustainability – a living concept bereft of fixed meaning - does. Through centring on how planning addresses the area’s industrial legacy as resource and source of problems, how plans articulate future visions, and the experiences of those now moving to Norra Sorgenfri, we explored social sustainability's possible roles and effects.

The project was of societal value in two ways. First, new knowledge about social sustainability provided feedback to planners involved in Norra Sorgenfri’s renewal at a time when core strategies could still be reoriented, and inspire those thinking about social sustainability elsewhere. Second, drawing together a group of academic and extra-academic actors (planners, policy-makers, inhabitants of Norra Sorgenfri, civil society organisations, etc.) should spur the kind of continued discussion required for social sustainability to be a progressive planning goal.