Social sustainability in urban renewal : a case study of Melbourne Docklands and Hammarby Sjöstad

Sammanfattning: Cities are forever transforming, never standing still; they are organisms in a constant evolution. With urbanization and globalization cities have gained importance and developed a need to compete with each other; one can say that today we live in a shrinking world where the cities nevertheless keep growing with an increasing population. With urban renewal, cities can both respond to the growing need for building more housing and provide an opportunity to stand out among other cities, why this is an approach many cities use to develop themselves. However, experiences from urban renewal projects have shown that there are many challenges associated with urban renewal, especially social challenges such as socioeconomic differences and segregation. Social challenges such as these constitute the foundation of the concept of social sustainability - the social dimension of sustainability. Therefore there is a need for landscape architects and urban planners to gain more knowledge about urban renewal developments and how to ensure that they become socially sustainable. In this thesis the complex concepts of urban renewal and social sustainability are studied and defined. A framework to be able to study the social sustainability of a city district has also been established in this thesis. This framework is based upon four groups of contribution factors to social sustainability; social services & accessibility, social mix & social inclusion, overall form & function and social networks & stability. The framework is used to study the social sustainability of two important and current cases of urban renewal developments; Melbourne Docklands in Melbourne, Australia and Hammarby Sjöstad in Stockholm, Sweden. From these two case studies twenty-seven different key points have been established that together form a guideline as to what to consider in urban renewal developments when wanting to create a socially sustainable neighborhood. The thesis ends with a reflection and discussion about social sustainability in urban renewal developments as well as provides ideas to new master thesis to other landscape architect students.