Renovating to passive housing in the Swedish million programme

This symposium deals head-on with pressing challenges of sustainable environmental and land-use planning, with real cases of experimenting with green planning and design taken well beyond the scale of green buildings. In an earlier auto- and oil-centric time we'd have said that these cases show us “where the rubber hits the road”, but these cases try to show us exactly the opposite of that: how we might design neighborhoods and plan environmental footprints that make energy conservation and even carbon neutrality possible in radically new ways so that less and less rubber needs to hit any road.

We present four studies, European and American, along with four critical commentaries, to explore the complexity of sustainability and its relationship to the much debated topic of eco-communities. We have chosen these cases to range across scales and political settings—from single buildings to potentially millions of housing units— so that we might assess both shared elements and significant differences as well. In every case, though, the planners and designers involved have struggled to understand sustainability and green design as ecologically complex, fully social and political as well as technically thought out, thus innovative in all of these dimensions as well.

Our aim has been to approach these issues from an integrated perspective looking for cases that covered a whole spectrum of possibilities in relation to such communities, ranging from a small case of a single non-residential compound to whole neighborhoods that were the outcome of Scandinavian social democratic housing policies several decades ago.

Our aim is to address a series of questions, not so much answers, that will undoubtedly arise in different disciplines and policy realms in the next decades: What might the main features of eco-communities be in the immediate future? Should they be considered as ideal types of sustainability, developing new models of urban life? Or rather, should the mere notion of sustainability make us look at what we have already done and try to redress its deficiencies as much as possible? Is retrofitting or new construction the real path to urban sustainability and to approach the potentials of eco-communities? How important are the physical qualities of the built environment in relation to the social, political or economic dimensions of sustainability?

We hope that the following pieces will contribute to these debates, now in an early stage, that we expect will become even more relevant in the context of continuing environmental and political-economic crisis.