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Conversation #84
It's about Time!
Addressing temporal challenges for sustainable planning
by Hannah Saldert
University West, Sweden
Ten years have passed since the adoption of the Paris Agreement and the Sustainable Development Goals. Back then, the year 2030 was far away on the horizon, but now it is approaching fast. We know that we have reached 1.1 °C warming on average compared to pre-industrial times due to human-caused greenhouse gas emissions. The year 2024 was the hottest year measured so far, reaching up to 1.55 °C increase (WMO, 2025). We also know that climate change is already affecting nature and people in all regions of the world (IPCC, 2023). The Sustainable Development Goal report from 2025 shows that there has been progress in the fulfilment of the goals, but only in 35% of the SDG targets, while 50% are moving too slowly, and 18% are even regressing. Looking particularly at SDG 11, Sustainable Cities and Communities, we see rapid urbanization, which puts pressure on the need for urban climate adaptation, and a growing housing affordability crisis affecting 3 billion people worldwide. The message from the Secretary-General of the United Nations, António Guterres, after the release of the report, and UN Climate Change Executive Secretary Simon Stiell, after the release of the 2025 NDC Synthesis Report, was that the progress we see is not enough. We must accelerate now; we are running out of time.
Time has always been a crucial aspect in both the concept of Sustainable Development and the practice of urban planning, but has rarely been the focus of research in the two fields. The existing literature mostly comes from anthropology and human geography, while there is less from other disciplines. The temporal dimension of urban planning is even seemingly taken for granted. Abram (2014, 129), for example, suggests that planning is by definition a temporal field due to it having the future as its objective. In a recent project, my colleagues Merritt Polk, Olga Stepanova, and I saw the importance of temporal factors when managing planning conflicts in Sweden. Particularly due to the long planning processes, where decisions made at one point in time are implemented often several years later, which can cause conflicts. We realized that time could play a much bigger role than what is usually acknowledged.
Within urban planning, there are several temporalities that risk clashing, particularly in terms of sustainable planning, where planners, on the one hand, use forecasting to understand demographic development and future needs to accommodate the population. On the other hand, strategic planning and sustainable development assume a need for backcasting, where the envisioned sustainable future needs to be operationalized into contemporary planning practice.
When planning for sustainability, time gains more weight and introduces new challenges. For example, advocates of sustainability present different ideals depending on what ideological perspective they assume. On the one hand, sustainability can be imagined as a need to go back to simpler times, romanticizing historical ways of living before industrialization and technological development. On the other hand, it can be imagined as a futuristic high-tech society dependent on technology that is not yet in use or has not yet been developed.
In my research, I saw that one main challenge of planning for socially sustainable cities is the conflict between short-term and long-term goals (Saldert, 2024). In this specific case, the short-term goals were represented by the financial viability of the development of a central urban area, which was prioritized over long-term socioeconomic goals.
In current turbulent times, while major global threats of climate change, biodiversity loss, poverty, and inequality are well acknowledged, issues relating to war, unemployment, and energy availability are portrayed as more urgent and risk overshadowing many of the long-term SDGs. The times we are living in raise the question of what is urgent in community development, longing for utopias or imagining dystopias, and facing an even more extreme challenge of how short-term and long-term goals should be weighed against each other.
Another issue, which receives too little attention, is the question of future generations. Timilsina et al. (2022) showed how urban citizens tend to think less about preservation for future generations compared to rural communities. This becomes a critical issue while we at the same time see rapid urbanization, with currently half of the earth’s population living in cities, and this proportion projected to reach 70 per cent by 2050. What will our communities look like if the majority of the earth’s population does not worry about our future generations?
The issue of time and temporality in sustainable planning is therefore seemingly crucial to address in order to deal with the contemporary polycrisis. In a recent article, Bogdanova and Soneryd (2024) developed a theoretical understanding of temporalities and care in processes of renovation. They argue that this is an important perspective for understanding the conditions for fostering collective processes of raising sustainability concerns. They argue that sustainability can be promoted by awareness of time perspectives.
To conclude, time is of the essence. Temporal dimensions of the polycrisis need to be addressed in both research and practice: How do we determine urgency? What are the risks of prioritizing immediate crises over seemingly long-term ones? How can we address temporal conflicts? And how can we ensure that urban communities feel solidarity with future generations? These are some of the issues we need a better understanding of to be able to plan for sustainable communities.
References:
Abram, S. (2014). The time it takes: Temporalities of planning. The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 129–147. Bogdanova, E., & Soneryd, L. (2024). Time, Care, and Sustainability: Temporal Conflicts and Housing Renovation. Housing, Theory and Society, 0(0), 1–16. IPCC. (2023). Climate Change 2023: Synthesis Report. Contribution of Working Groups I, II and III to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Geneva: IPCC. Saldert, H. (2024). Social sustainability for whom? The role of discursive boundary objects in Swedish strategic urban planning. Geoforum, 152, 104022. Timilsina, R. R., Kotani, K., Nakagawa, Y., & Saijo, T. (2022). Intragenerational deliberation and intergenerational sustainability dilemma. European Journal of Political Economy, 73, 102131. WMO. (2025). WMO confirms 2024 as warmest year on record at about 1.55°C above pre-industrial level.
The Brundtland report famously defines sustainable development as “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” Hannah Saldert correctly raises the issue that time is often forgotten in sustainable development and urban planning. I agree and would also say it is understandable. Time, at least to me, seems like something difficult to grasp. When the Paris Agreement was signed ten years ago, times seemed more stable. Now, it feels like social and environmental change is speeding up. More and more is happening; the clock feels like it’s ticking faster. We experience more extreme weather events, long-lasting regime struggles over natural resources, and environmental changes with impacts not yet even on the horizon. As with space, time also happens on various scales. I would add in plural, it’s about times.
Is sustainable development something we can really plan with the same modernist technocratic attitude that got us to this point, or is urban planning only reactionary in the face of social and environmental change? Writing this from Finland, our annual temperature is already over three degrees Celsius warmer than in the pre-industrial era.
However, that is not really a political issue; Finland can easily implement adaptive planning to cope with increasing wildfires and seasonal floods. The Netherlands can still deal with rising sea levels with expensive technologies, but what about Bangladesh? Global South has limits to its resilience. Finland is in real crisis if the AMOC collapses and temperatures drop by up to 10 degrees Celsius.
Saldert’s question about the temporality of polycrisis is crucial. Adaptive and resilience planning can address problems with contemporary and short-term time horizons. But regime changes and ecological tipping points loom in the horizon and beyond. Future generations are hopefully there and then too, but our response is here and now.
I agree with Antti Wallin’s addition. He is emphasizing the question of justice, not only between current and future generations, but between Global North and Global South as well. It is interesting to think about time in plurality and how this differs between different groups. As Wallin properly raises, different countries have unequal access to resources to both adopt and to mitigate climate change. Different countries are also facing the urgency of crisis differently. For some countries, the consequences of climate change are still in the future (perhaps closer than before, but still in the future), while others are experiencing catastrophic extreme weather already now (and have for some time). This, of course, affects the temporal experience of climate change.
Another question of temporal injustice could perhaps be seen within countries as well, between classes or socio-economic groups. We know that environmental hazards tend to affect low-income and high-income residential areas differently. We could perhaps see differences in temporalities between these groups as well. For example, when it comes to sustainable lifestyles, putting efforts into environmentally friendly behaviors (such as recycling, traveling with public transport/bike/by foot, repairing broken things, and ensuring consumption of sustainable food) is time-consuming.