The Sustainable City

Abstract: Investigating the matter of urban sustainability, previous research within the field argues that the social dimension of sustainability has been deprioritized, one potential reason being that it is less tangible then the economic and ecological dimension. Furthermore, citizen participation and inclusiveness is identified as central to the social dimension on an international as well as Swedish national level. As participation and non-discrimination are central aspects of a human rights perspective as well, the aim of this thesis is to investigate how civil dialogue can be utilized as a tool for promoting human rights-based social sustainability in an urban development context. The theoretical approach of the thesis consists of a human rights perspective on urban development, which was created by combining the theories of The Right to the City by David Harvey and The Just City by Susan Fainstein. Using a SWOT analysis, the human rights perspective is applied to a case study on civil dialogue in the City of Lund. Strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats are identified and analyzed in relation to the human rights perspective, where after the result from the analysis is discussed with key themes identified in previous research. The thesis concludes that civil dialogue, if underpinned by human rights values, can be used as an indicator of human rights-based social sustainability, thereby promoting the social dimension of sustainability and furthering the sustainable city.