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Paper short abstract:

This paper investigates planning for sustainability, considering how expertise, values and politics are cast into environmental assessment tools used by planners, and how the technical attributes of these tool go on to determine future material structures as part of a hybrid practice of planning.

Paper long abstract:

Advancing sustainability principles in planning involves the articulation of values, ideals and politics into a socio-material process of interventions. Based on a qualitative case study on the application of building environment assessments to planning policy in Israel, this paper considers how environmental assessment for buildings can both frame and perform sustainable planning. Using the lens of "standards", as conceptualized by STS, the research suggests that environmental assessment tools do not only reflect embedded politics and compromises between different stakeholders. When successfully mobilized, their weight, legitimacy and presentation of expertise all contribute to the persistence, diffusion and uptake of particular sustainability approaches, beyond that which might have occurred with other, more localized tools. This approach builds a common sustainability agenda and also enables tools developed in one geographic or institutional context to travel between cities and countries, as mobile definitions of sustainability.

Responding to this track's inquiry into how planners work with artefacts to set conditions for intervention, the research presents a hybrid perspective on planning goals that takes into account the interaction between planners and assessment tools. The choice and use of tools as outlined here is suggested to have an epistemic impact on definitions of sustainability within the planning process. This analysis of the impact of environmental assessment tools within planning isn't simply a deconstruction, but a call for more reflexivity and awareness of the possible black boxing of concepts such as sustainable construction or urban sustainability and their potential impact on local expertise and planning.