Planning for Sustainability : Are sustainable neighbourhoods creating sustainable lifestyles?

Sammanfattning: The impact of unsustainable human actions has grown to become the most significant underlying factor of current environmental problems, which stresses the need for a large-scale transformative change in our modern ways of living. Sustainable development has emerged to become the primary framework to reduce climate impact, and sustainable neighbourhoods have become a highly sought out and desirable policy goal. However, there exists a concern that contemporary spatial planning policies and strategies appear to be inadequate to achieve the transformative lifestyle change needed due to their primary adoption of an ecological modernisation agenda. With this notion and by examining the ongoing urban development project Täby Park in Täby municipality is the aim of this thesis to investigate to what extent and how a more environmentally sustainable way of living can be met through (supporting) contemporary spatial planning and design policies, strategies, and its physical manifestation in the built environment. For this has a theoretical framework rooted in social and behavioural science been adopted to understand the relationship between sustainable lifestyles and influencing factors. The empirical material is based on conducted interviews with residents, public and private actors, a questionnaire, and a site visit.  The findings of this study show that the development of Täby Park is primarily rooted in an approach of behavioural-economics, which in large has translated to an ecological modernisation agenda. Overall, it can be concluded that a more environmentally sustainable way of living can to a certain extent be met through the applied policies and strategies in Täby Park. Although the residents perceive that factors rooted in rational reasoning hold the most significant impact on their adoption of more environmentally sustainable actions in their everyday life, do the findings illustrate that the residents generally deviate from rational reasoning of decision-making. This illustrates that the desired sustainability vision cannot be modelled after generic assumptions of behavioural-economics.