Urban sustainability - lessons from good planning practices. Visiting the friendship twin towns of Mbombela and Oslo

The Oslo Centre for Interdisciplinary Environmental and Social Research (CIENS)' theme group on urban sustainability proposes, together with South African development researhcers, a research project questioning planning as a tool for urban sustainability. Some 'good practice' cases will be selected in order to increase the knowledge on trends and conditions for a sustainable urban development. The project will be a comparative, case study of the two friendship twin towns of Mbombela and Oslo, focusing the north-south dimension and addressing the common challenge of urban sustainability, in highly different contexts. Some key sustainability areas have been selected. Specific project issues will be water infrastructure, green structure and transport struct ure, air quality and exposure analyses and particular studies of the institutional capacity building in the - more or less - participatory planning processes in the two cities. Methodologically, when focusing the same phenomena, the same kind of process es, under extremely different conditions, some causal relationships may appear particularly salient. Important questions are how and why research and knowledge - as data, ideas and arguments - is used differently in the various planning processes; and wha t the main conditions are for facilitating sustainable tracks and good implementation paths by urban planning - i.e. good planning practices in urban areas.