Inclusive Community Planning - Collaboration for knowledge-based and Sustainable Community Development

The current project is based on four research projects financed by Formas’ call for proposals on Sustainable Community Planning.

Joined together, these four projects provide broad knowledge on how cities and societies can be developed to becoming social sustainable.

The research projects are anchoraged at the Department of Social Work, Umeå university, and so is the communication project which will be driven in collaboration with the Association of Local Authorities of Norrbotten.Sustainable Cities and Communities is one of the goals in United Nations´ action plan Agenda 2030, with the ambition to make cities and communities inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable.

In Sweden, the municipalities have the major responsibility for planning and developing sustainable cities and communities.

All of Swedens’ municipalities are obligated to the same legislative conditions, but there is a variation between the municipalities concerning economy, demography and available competence.

Moreover, the municipalities do not have the same resources, competences and experiences available when it comes to conduct sustainable community planning.

These disparate conditions indicate a need for communication of research results, experiences and strategies from studies focusing on the social parts of the content in Goal 11: Sustainable Cities and Communities.The aim of the communication project is to provide the target group with research-based knowledge and strategies for social community planning, using several forms of mediated communication.

The target group includes local politicians and officials in the 14 municipalities of Norrbotten county, who have social community development as a part of their duties.

In the project, communication channels which is independent of time and room, such as podcasts and movies, will be used.

In addition, online-workshops will be arranged as an arena where participants of the target group can meet each other to share and disseminate knowledge.One expected overarching result of the project is that the target group should have gained new perspectives, methods and tools which they could use in their development of social sustainability within their municipalities.

Possible synergies could be an increased inter-municipal collaboration concerning community planning.

In addition, Umeå university and the Association of Local Authorities of Norrbotten is supposed to incorporate and manage the result of the project on other contexts.