From concept to operation: planning practices of urban social sustainability

Journal article, 2026

Although social sustainability is widely recognised as a vague concept, it has become an important aspect of urban planning. However, there is limited knowledge of how urban planners and designers (practitioners) interpret and operationalise it in practice. This paper explores how the concept of urban social sustainability (USS), formulated in planning policy, is conceptualised and translated into practice through operationalisation. The inherent vagueness of USS can allow misalignments between goals and outcomes, questioning the legitimacy of the planning process. The results of 15 interviews with practitioners from Sweden, the Netherlands and Denmark reveal that strategies for conceptualising and operationalising USS are interdependent and include an intermediate process of re-conceptualisation. For conceptualisation, practitioners use six strategies, and for operationalisation, they rely on tools like municipal policies, public participation and digital resources. The results show that the translation of USS from conceptualisation to operationalisation is shaped by dimensions of time and scale to re-conceptualise USS. By adopting a semiotic perspective of translation, the study highlights the interpretive agency of practitioners in shaping the meaning of USS, contributing to a deeper understanding of how USS is made actionable in practice and offers insights for policy and tool development in socially sustainable urban planning.