Soft Planning for climate-neutral Cities – Findings from Vienna, Oslo and Malmö

Sustainable transition and climate neutrality of cities requires profound changes and more radical planning practices, often outside the regular statutory planning systems. These practices are referred to in the literature as 'soft planning'. The aim of this article is to analyze how cities with ambitious climate goals use soft planning practices as a means to work around the hard institutional frameworks to achieve climate neutrality. We conducted indepth interviews with planners in three European cities with high ambitions for sustainability and climate neutrality: Vienna, Oslo and Malm & ouml;. These three cities have adopted policies for climate neutrality by 2030 or 2040. Our analysis focuses on four features of soft planning: informality, voluntarism, complementarity and effectiveness. Our findings suggest that the importance of soft and hard planning varies over time making their relationship somewhat ambiguous. They also suggest that there seems to be a breaking point at which soft planning could turn into less effective processes.