Social sustainability from the perspective of three concepts: human scale, the city at eye-level, and public life

Abstract: There has been lately a rich amount of articles highlighting the incoherent nature of theterm social sustainability and what it really means in an urban practice. Some argues for anincreased knowledge about the relation between social aspects and the physicalenvironment in order to better enhance the social dimension. The normative- and designoriented concepts human scale, the city at eye-level and public life may clarify the role ofdesign to accomplish desired social aspects.The aim of this thesis is to investigate how these concepts may provide a way to approachsocial sustainability with a focus on the public realm. Further aim is to identify problems andopportunities in the implementation phase since the often occurring gap between vision andpractice. The strategy is to create guidelines from theoretical understanding of the conceptsbased on a literature study and examine how these may relate to a created conceptualframework of social sustainability. Afterwards the guidelines are used to evaluate three caseexamples; the renewal of Rosengård, Malmö; the development of Järla Sjö, Nacka and thedevelopment of Prästviken, Botkyrka, regarding their fulfillment of the concepts. Knowledgeabout the case examples are mainly gathered from interviews by practitioners involved inabove mentioned projects and also function as an insight of general implementation issues.The results show that human scale, the city at eye-level and public life promote severaldesign inputs with effects on the functionality and experience of the public realm andargued social impact on safety & security, sense of belonging, social interaction and wellbeing. However these impacts may only be indicated and the concepts fail to acknowledgethe political dimension of social sustainability. Further the possibility to implement thedesign implications depend on geographical location, project driving forces and the nature ofthe builder