Sustainable urbanism in glitch : Queering singular visions of sustainable urban development

SUSTAINABILITY is increasingly framed as a task to be solved in and through cities, not least by planning and designing built environments that ‘nudges’ individuals towards sustainable ways of living. Realising visions of a sustainable urban future is thus at least partially dependent upon affecting individual and collective behaviors. So, what happens when coherent visions of sustainable urban development appear to be in glitch with the messy heterogeneity of everyday life? In this text, I will show some examples of such glitches from studies of the large-scale sustainable urban development (SUD) project Hyllie in Malmö, Sweden. While lacking coherence between vision and everyday life can appear threatening to the trajectory of a sustainability transition, I argue that it can also be seen as a queer opportunity to facilitate transformative change in a manner that supports diversity.