Urban sustainability and counter-sustainability: Spatial contradictions and conflicts in policy and governance in the Freiburg and Calgary metropolitan regions

Drawing on empirical research carried out in the metropolitan regions of Freiburg, Germany, and Calgary, Canada, we reposition the sustainability policies of municipalities within a wider regional and relational framework. This perspective reveals significant epistemological blind spots in the localist and non-relational ontologies that undergird much of the urban sustainability discourse. While the city of Freiburg has garnered world-wide attention for its multi-faceted initiatives and achievements in sustainable urban development, these initiatives have yet to be coherently addressed in the wider Freiburg metropolitan region, leading to a variety of policies and practices in the hinterland that run counter to Freiburg’s ‘green city’ objectives. In a parallel fashion, the city of Calgary incorporated significant sustainability principles in its 2009 Master Development Plan and Transportation Plan –‘Plan-It’– yet such principles have not been taken up on a regional scale. Despite substantial differences in size and developmental history, both cities exhibit a profound disconnection from their regional contexts with regard to sustainable development policies and politics. In both metropolitan regions, conventional growth politics are still paramount. A significant conflict emerges between ‘sustainable’ central cities seeking a ‘sustainability fix’ to their fiscal, environmental and quality of life problems, and more remote jurisdictions seeking to attract investment through low tax regimes and limited development regulation – what we label a ‘counter-sustainability fix’. These contrasting and dialectically related policies have substantial consequences for the social and environmental dimensions of sustainable development, calling into question policies that promote ‘sustainability in one place’.