This article approaches urban ethics through critically examining the production and reproduction of an eco-modern socio-technical imaginary of sustainable urban development in Sweden, and the conditions and obstacles this poses for a just transformation. We see that notions of ecological modernization re-present problems of urban sustainability in ways that do not challenge the predominant regime, but rather uphold unjust power relations. More particularly, through an approach inspired by critical discourse analysis, we uncover what these problem representations entail, deconstructing what we find as three cornerstones of an eco-modern imaginary that obstruct the emergence of a more ethically-engaged understanding of urban sustainability. The first concerns which scales and system boundaries are constructed as relevant, and how this results in some modes and places of production and consumption being constructed as more efficient—and sustainable—than others. The second cornerstone has to do with what resources and ways of using them (including mediating technologies) are foregrounded and constructed as more important in relation to sustainability than others. The third cornerstone concerns the construction of subjectivities, through which some types of people and practices are put forth as more efficient—and sustainable—than others. Utilizing a critical speculative design approach, we explore a selection of alternative problem representations, and finally discuss these in relation to the possibility of affording a more ethical urban design and planning practice.

We need to transition our society in a more sustainable direction, for example through enormous cuts in carbon emissions. Yet this future is hard to envision and work towards. In this project, with a transition design posture, we have designed tools that we believe can be useful to initiate dialogues and reflections for the future. In particular we are interested in using the bridging between provocative and affirmative design as a way to explore and articulate what people see as the lost and found of such a transition. In this paper, we present a study where we used a practice lens to address one possible low carbon future through a provocation workshop. We present our methodology, the tentative tools we used during the workshop and the experiences as expressed by the workshop participants.

The artificial world is part of an on-going negotiation of meaning, manifesting in social practice. From a sustainability perspective it is thus important to critically examine what norms are imprinted into the artificial, as well as to imagine, materialize and suggest artefacts that could afford more sustainable stories and practices to form. The project Sensing Energy is an attempt to explore how design could contribute to a re-imagination of everyday life and society, as well as what imaginaries (artefacts and related stories) could come out of such an endeavour. A critical and speculative design programme comprising the three leitmotifs Natureculture, Microsizing modernity, and Focal things and practices, provided a frame and foundation for a series of design experiments. The resulting artefacts were presented at two different workshops in which participants were asked to form stories that integrated one or more of the design experiments into their everyday life. Based on the material from the workshops we can conclude that the design experiments worked well as parts of or catalysts for new stories of the everyday.

The ongoing and escalating urbanisation has resulted in a situation where a majority of people worldwide live in cities. Cities stand for a substantial part of the world GDP and are often lifted as possible drivers of sustainable development. However, the city has limitations and vulnerabilities. Cities depend on resources flowing into the city and increasing populations strain their land use. Climate change threatens cities with sea-level rise, heat waves and extreme weather events. Transforming cities into Smart Sustainable Cities by incorporation of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) is becoming a recurring proposed solution to these limitations and challenges. The two main areas where ICT are envisioned to function for this are i) as part of the city's infrastructure for monitoring, efficiency and automatization of processes, and ii) as an enabler for sharing of both information and goods among citizens, expectedly leading to more sustainable urban lifestyles. However, there are several limits to the realisation of the Smart Sustainable City. Manufacturing, implementation and maintenance of its digital infrastructure hold environmental risks and require human and natural resources. Furthermore, there are issues of increased vulnerability of the city due to increased complexity. Already now, the (global) flows that the city depends upon to thrive, are to a large and increasing extent possible due to -And dependent on - ICTs working without disturbances. Considering the fragility of these systems, both physical and virtual, is the Smart Sustainable City a desirable or even feasible path? We suggest that while ICT may be useful for making cities more sustainable, we need to be heedful so as not to make the city even more vulnerable in the process. We suggest that we should make sure that the ICT systems simply assist the cities, while maintaining analogue backup in case the ICT shuts down; that we should build more resilient ICT systems with higher backward compatibility; and that we should acknowledge increasing complexity as a problem and strive to counteract it.

Vi måste acceptera den föreliggande verkligheten – endast därigenom har vi utsikt att förstå den, att relatera till den för att påverka den och skapa kultur som är ett smidigt redskap för omställningen.

Så inleds Vitiden – en energifiktion där övergången till ett mer hållbart samhälle utforskas i ett samspel mellan text och bild. I det framåtsyftande manifestet skissas Vitiden upp som ett svar på dagens ekologiska och sociala utmaningar. Manifestets höga tonläge och ambitioner kommenteras av en bildburen framtidsarkeologi, uppbyggd kring fiktiva fragment från framtiden. Infällda bilder ur acceptera-manifestet¹, vilket även parafraseras i Vitidens inledande stycke, sätter energifiktionen i relation till det modernistiska samhällsbygget och kritiken därav. En generös notapparat bidrar med ytterligare perspektiv.

Vitiden utforskar hur ett energi- och klimatmässigt hållbart Sverige skulle kunna te sig, med fokus på vardagslivets praktiker. Bokens titel Vitiden pekar på ett framtida samhälle där det gemensamma är centralt, och energi är en högt värderad resurs. Vitiden är baserad på ett av Energimyndighetens scenarion (Legato) ur framtidsstudien "Fyra framtider: energisystemet efter 2020".

Vitidens syfte är att bjuda in till samtal, reflektion och diskussion om hur vårt samhälle kan organiseras för att klimatmålen ska nås. Genom en kombination av text och bild skapas en komplex bild av omställningen som ger utrymme för såväl moraliska ställningstaganden, utopiska drömmar och vardagstristess.Vitiden är uppbyggd av fyra huvudsakliga delar:

1. Ett manifest, där vi ger scenariot Legato röst att tala om behovet av omställning i relation till fyra vardagspraktiker "Vi bor", "Vi äter", "Vi reser" och "Vi arbetar och har fritid".
2. En framtidsarkeologi, som representerar hur samhället och vardagslivet skulle kunna te sig om Legato infrias.
3. Inklippta bilder ur acceptera-manifestet som publicerades 1931, och som manade på funktionalismens och modernismens genombrott i Sverige. Denna omställning är av samma magnitud som den vi nu står inför, varför en samläsning av Legato och acceptera är intressant.
4. En notapparat där vi forskare kommenterar manifestet genom att hänvisa till forskning samt en liten dos poesi.

Vitiden är utvecklad av forskare vid Green Leap, KTH tillsammans med grafiska formgivare och illustratörer. Projektet är finansierat av Energimyndigheten.

¹ Asplund, G., Gahn, W., Markelius, S., Paulsson, G., Sundahl, E., Åhrén, U. 1980[1931] acceptera. Tiden förlag. Faksimil.

We must accept the present reality – only thereby do we have the possibility to understand it, relate to it to influence it and create culture that is a flexible tool for the transition.

This is the opening paragraph of "Vitiden - an energy fiction"¹ where the transition to a more sustainable society is explored through interacting text and image. In the forward-looking and text-based manifesto, Vitiden is outlined as an answer to today's ecological and social challenges. The high pitch and ambitions of the manifesto are commented on by an image-based future archaeology, constructed by fictional fragments of the future. Inset images from the acceptera manifesto², which is also paraphrased in the introductory paragraph of Vitiden, relates the energy fiction to the modernist societal development and the critique thereof. A generous body of annotations contributes with further perspectives.

1) The term Vitiden is Swedish and can be translated to the 'we-age'. In contrast to other 'ages' such as the bronze age or the atom age, Vitiden is not a description of a historical era, but a suggested future, an age yet to come, distinguished by its emphasis on togetherness.

¹An energy fiction is a design fiction or essentially any image of the future dealing primarily with questions related to energy, in this case as an enabling and constraining factor for sociomaterial entanglements and practices to emerge and endure.

²Asplund, G., Gahn, W., Markelius, S., Paulsson, G., Sundahl, E., Åhrén, U. 1980[1931] acceptera. Tiden förlag. Faksimil.

There is unequivocal evidence that we are facing the greatest energy transition since the dawn of the industrial age. We need to urgently shift from a global fossil fuel and CO2-emitting energy system to 1) decrease our CO2 emissions and combat the effects of climate change and 2) face a future of depleting fossil fuel resources. Yet there is still a lack of collective action to start taking effective measures to meet these challenges. We argue that there is a need for narratives in general and for a special type of narrative in particular, allohistorical scenarios, that act as thought experiments whose main function is to defamiliarize us with what is taken for granted. Such scenarios invite us to explore plausible parallel paths, thereby making it possible to imagine futures that are essentially different from the path-dependence of an unyielding historical past. Such futures enable us to grapple with a present that is saturated by the inertia of past decisions and the sunken costs of existing infrastructure. We here present the design rationale for the Coalworld scenario: an alternative world where only half the oil ever existed. We also describe the methodology and the assumptions that underlie the Coalworld scenario.

Certification systems for sustainable neighbourhoods started to emerge around a decade ago. This study analysed the content, structure, weighting and indicators of two established certification systems for sustainable urban development - BREEAM Communities and LEED for Neighborhood Development. Several limitations of these systems were identified: both have a bias for procedure and feature indicators over indicators that assess actual performance; performance demands are set according to a relative understanding of sustainable development; the focus is on internal sustainability, while upstream and downstream impacts of construction are disregarded; the number and distribution of mandatory issues do not cover essential sustainability aspects; and the disproportionately large number of non-mandatory issues makes benchmarking difficult and signals that sustainability aspects are exchangeable. Altogether, this means that an area can be certified without being sustainable. Moreover, the lack of continuous development of certification requirements in the systems means that they risk exerting a conservative effect on urban development, rather than pushing it forward.