ABSTRACT
This chapter lays the conceptual, methodological, and empirical foundations of the book by presenting Aalborg as a paradigmatic case of urban sustainability in the making. It introduces the Urban Sustainability Compass – a heuristic framework that integrates four interpretive logics (urgency, legitimation, implementation, and experimentation) with four theoretical perspectives: Urban Political Ecology, Just Sustainability, Phronetic Planning, and Urban Sustainability Governance. These analytical lenses enable a situated understanding of how sustainability is reasoned through, contested, and institutionalised in everyday planning practices. Rather than treating urban sustainability as a fixed endpoint or a technocratic ideal, the chapter foregrounds narrative, reflexivity, and situated agency as critical components of sustainability transformations. The chapter traces Aalborg’s development through four interrelated phases – post-industrial crisis, governance innovation, strategic implementation, and contemporary experimentation – highlighting how socio-material change, governance rationalities, and planning imaginaries evolve in interaction over time.
Framing sustainability as a recursive and context-dependent field, the chapter not only introduces the empirical analyses that follow but also anticipates the book’s concluding argument: that sustainability must be continuously made, unmade, and remade through processes of institutional learning, conflict, and co-evolution. The Aalborg case demonstrates that meaningful urban transformation requires not just policy alignment or technical fixes, but a deeper paradigm shift in how planners, designers, and scholars understand and enact sustainability in practice.
