US city planners can learn lessons from the successes of Malmö‘s eco-districts

With the decline and demise of manufacturing industries in many areas across the US, city planners now have an opportunity to introduce policies to make cities more sustainable. Joan Fitzgerald looks at lessons in sustainability from the Swedish city of Malmö which used its industrial decline in the 1990s as an opportunity to create an eco-district. She writes that through a participatory planning process city planners were able to test the effectiveness of green technologies while building the social infrastructure of neighborhoods. She argues that much of the city’s success is a story of effective urban planning and these lessons can be applied anywhere.