Value conflicts in urban biodiversity management - case studies of Swedish municipalities

In this project we will survey how four Swedish municipalities -Gothenburg, Malmö, Stockholm and Umeå- seek to combine biodiversity preservation with urban development.

All four municipalities have either explicit plans for urban biodiversity, or has included biodiversity preservation in their comprehensive plans.Through interviews with municipal planners and overviews of central relevant documents, the 3-year project will explicate and identify goals and value conflicts in urban biodiversity planning.

By drawing on theories of urban development and applied ethics, the goals and value conflicts will be analyzed and reasoned about in a structured manner.

A central aim, in addition to the scholarly aim of identifying value conflicts at the point where biodiversity and urban development meet, is to establish guidelines and a guidebook to facilitate municipal urban biodiversity planning.

The guidelines will be developed during the last year of the project, and will be tested through workshops in each of the four municipalities to assess the extent to which the guidelines facilitate urban biodiversity planning, and to inform the research project on how the guidelines can be improved.Due to its applied ambitions, conjunct with the increasing interest in urban biodiversity, the project is likely to have far-reaching social implementations.