Varför gör vi inte som vi säger? Realitet, retorik och dialektik i svensk stadsutveckling med fokus på energi och fysiska strukturer

Sammanfattning: In this doctoral thesis, case-studies on comprehensive planning and urban development in two Swedish municipalities reveals explanations and answers to how urban form that affects energy use and climate has changed between 1990-2010, how visions and goals are expressed in planning documents and what might cause the gap between the rhetoric of planning and the reality of urban development concerning energy and climate issues.Several methods are used under the canopy of case study methodology and an abductive research approach; time-series analysis with GIS-indicators to measure changes in urban structure; discourse analysis with a focus on rhetoric and interviews with responsible planning officials using a range of dialectics-based concepts as a framework to reveal hidden structures and mechanisms behind the gap.Findings indicate that the dynamics of planning and urban development in the last decades displays traits similar to dynamics of complex adaptive systems such as non-linearity, path-dependency, increasing diversity, emergent self-organized order and the influence of ‘internal models’. These traits are considered to be one part of the explanation to the gap, but the case-studies also show the importance of the dialectical interplay between structure and agency in terms of organisation, coalitions, institutional capacity and the local repertoire of manipulative strategies in the exercise of power. Parallel trajectories of development such as both densification and sprawl, hidden behind a rhetorical cloak of sustainability and attractiveness, indicates the existence of multiple worlds of conception in the perspectives of different actors. Actors´ cognitive limitations and the structuration of powerful figures of thought further points to a conclusion that planning is, to a large extent, entrapped within the deeply established figures of neo-liberal economic thought, preventing a synthesis of energy- and climate issues with urban development and pushing the systems perspective on energy in planning into ‘otherness’.