This article advocates the need for strategic spatial planning practices to cope with the crises of climate change that confront cities and regions today. Planners face sustainability challenges regarding their ability to plan for the cities of tomorrow. The aim of this article is to analyse how institutional conditions can enable the planners’ strategic spatial planning for sustainable development in Swedish municipalities. We will use institutional capacity as a theoretical framework to understand how the planners use planning instruments while planning for sustainable development. Our empirical research builds on four Swedish municipalities where we have set out to explore knowledge resources, relational resources and mobilization capacity for analysing planners’ use of planning instruments for sustainable development. Our results indicate that the institutional capacity in the municipalities does not enable the planners to strive for sustainable development. Planners in Swedish municipalities have many ideas, visions and initiatives for sustainable development, but are often not informed of the political agenda or how to prioritize. For achieving strategic spatial planning, the planners will need a more clear political will and mandate to act and prioritize.

This article investigates how the international wave of decentralisation of development policy, promoted through ideals of place-based policy, becomes practice through development interventions made by municipalities in Sweden. Based on an extensive empirical study across Swedish municipalities, the article contributes with knowledge about how the decentralisation of development policies is formed through a combination of shared and relatively heterodox conditions for development interventions across the different categories of municipalities: cities, towns and rural settlements. The results describe the varying scope of local development interventions and how decentralisation involves differentiating the involvement of municipalities into vertical and horizontal relations within the planning sector. The article’s findings about the variations in local development interventions across the different categories of municipalities contribute to the debate within geography on the varying capacities of different geographical formations to mobilise for bottom-up development, leading to the weaker regions remaining weak. The results of this article also illustrate the importance of reflecting upon how particular national planning systems shape the implications of the general international trend towards the decentralisation of local development policy.

As a result of rapid development in China and the growth of megacities, large amounts of organic wastes are generated within relatively small areas. Part of these wastes can be used to produce biogas, not only to reduce waste-related problems, but also to provide renewable energy, recycle nutrients, and lower greenhouse gases and air polluting emissions. This article is focused on the conditions for biogas solutions in Guangzhou. It is based on a transdisciplinary project that integrates several approaches, for example, literature studies and lab analysis of food waste to estimate the food waste potential, interviews to learn about the socio-technical context and conditions, and life-cycle assessment to investigate the performance of different waste management scenarios involving biogas production. Xiaoguwei Island, with a population of about 250,000 people, was chosen as the area of study. The results show that there are significant food waste potentials on the island, and that all studied scenarios could contribute to a net reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. Several socio-technical barriers were identified, but it is expected that the forthcoming regulatory changes help to overcome some of them.

Building energy simulation (BES) models rely on a variety of different input data, and the more accurate the input data are, the more accurate the model will be in predicting energy use. The objective of this paper is to show a method for obtaining higher accuracy in building energy simulations of existing buildings by combining time diaries with data from logged measurements, and also to show that more variety is needed in template values of user input data in different kinds of buildings. The case studied in this article is a retirement home in Linköping, Sweden. Results from time diaries and interviews were combined with logged measurements of electricity, temperature, and CO₂ levels to create detailed occupant behavior schedules for use in BES models. Two BES models were compared, one with highly detailed schedules of occupancy, electricity use, and airing, and one using standardized input data of occupant behavior. The largest differences between the models could be seen in energy losses due to airing and in household electricity use, where the one with standardized user input data had a higher amount of electricity use and less losses due to airing of 39% and 99%, respectively. Time diaries and interviews, together with logged measurements, can be great tools to detect behavior that affects energy use in buildings. They can also be used to create detailed schedules and behavioral models, and to help develop standardized user input data for more types of buildings. This will help improve the accuracy of BES models so the energy efficiency gap can be reduced.