ABSTRACT

This chapter summarises the history of how the Swedish planning regulations have developed since the nineteenth century with regard to the environment and sustainability. The connection between societal development, health, and the natural environment is presented. Growing industrialisation led to urbanisation, which also led to a growing need for town planning. The master plans summarised the long-term requirements to protect from fire, replace wooden buildings with higher-level stone buildings, and improve sanitation. The Swedish planning regulations are, as in most Nordic countries, based on the need to organise fire protection and ensure sanitation provisions. The industrialisation and urbanisation of the last half of the nineteenth and the first part of the twentieth centuries were the drivers for the introduction of general planning legislation in Sweden. In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the political objective has been to integrate sustainability concerns with spatial planning in relation to the built environment.