Paper short abstract:

Sustainable cities imagine peaceful, tolerant, and green places free from today's fears of ecological destruction and social and political unrest. But who is this utopian future for, and how can it be achieved? How is sustainability and utopia constructed and maintained, and for what purposes?

Paper long abstract:

This paper addresses the creation and framing of at times utopian futures in relation to the ongoing vision planning in a Swedish coastal city, which is aimed towards the not-so-distant year of 2035. The choice for sustainable city planning is often motivated by a normative rhetoric of two potential futures: a dystopian or utopian one. Thus strategic urban planners are creating, pursing, negotiating, and maintaining ever-fluctuating utopian (hence sustainable) visions of the future. This concerns the 'elusive promises' (Abram and Weszkalnys 2013) in city planning and it is about the consequences and complications of efforts to envision and plan unknowable futures.

City marketing and branding contribute much to this city's future envisioning process through the use of social media, large promotional fairs, and marketing events among other methods. Posters, a website, and a blog promote the vision by describing a sustainable future in the year 2035. "What do you want?" they muse to their audience. Yet the process of fantasizing about the future raises many questions, not least the question of for whom that future is being built, and by whom. Whose utopia (or ideas of sustainability, democracy, or values) counts in the process of constructing the future? Which future city will come into being and for whom is this future city?