Surface Disputes, Deep Divides: What Urban Sustainability Conflicts Reveal About Just Transitions

Urban sustainability transitions are often accompanied by conflicts between the involved parties and competing narratives, while raising questions about different dimensions of justice and their (non-)consideration. Examples include disputes about mobility transition measures and the implementation of urban blue-green infrastructure, such as disagreements over the use of brownfield sites for new construction or green space development, or the unsealing of areas previously used for car parking. From a sociological perspective, conflicts are a constitutive and normal part of societies, and can be a productive driver of social change, as argued by Georg Simmel and other scholars. Therefore, conflicts are valuable and important elements of transformative processes, making diverging norms and values as well as inequalities explicit and negotiable. A key question is under what conditions conflicts become a productive moment for addressing inequality, and when entrenched conflicts hinder transformation processes towards sustainability or deepen existing divides. This presentation shares initial findings from case studies on narratives and conflicts related to urban blue-green infrastructures and urban land uses in Leipzig. One case, for example, is the Superblocks project. Inspired by the Superblocks project in Barcelona, the Leipzig initiative aimed to create traffic-calmed areas and increase green infrastructure. Local civil society, the municipality and academia collaborated to implement the measures. The results reveal the complex interaction between foreground conflicts — the disputes and negotiations surrounding the actual measures and policies linked to the Superblocks project — and the conflicts' background, which is characterised by deep-rooted underlying issues and broader meta-debates intertwined with existing inequalities as well as diverging identities, values, and beliefs of those involved. This background can fuel more direct conflicts through emotionalised disputes and hardened positions, while simultaneously making diverging perspectives on what constitutes justice visible and subject to debate. Based on the results, approaches for successfully negotiating such intertwined local conflicts are discussed, specifically focusing on the question of how collaborative urban sustainability interventions can adequately address dimensions of (in)equality and under what conditions they transform conflicts into productive moments for more equitable sustainability transitions. The case study research presented is part of the ‘Policy narratives and conflicts’ work package within the ‘Urban transformations towards blue-green infrastructures’ project, which has been running since October 2024 and is funded by the Helmholtz Association. The project aims to promote the development, planning and evaluation of blue-green infrastructure, and thus concrete urban transformations towards socio-ecological sustainability, by applying interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary approaches.