CLASS, CLIMATE AND CITIES: Why is ‘Sustainability’ Most Popular at an Urban Scale?

Introduction

The geography of climate change presents some interesting ambiguities. People in the global North are more responsible for causing global warming than those in the global South, and nation-states—not cities—are the most powerful actors to combat further warming. Nevertheless, the places most often celebrated for sustainability are cities in the global North.

Angelo and Wachsmuth (2020: 2201) identify three ‘historical developments’ to help us understand why cities have moved from being considered a ‘sustainability problem’ to a ‘sustainability solution’: the growth of urban sprawl in the global North, the growth of informal settlements in the global South, and climate change. In this article I explore the third phenomenon by asking why and how climate change makes cities into a ‘solution’ and show that some answers are found in the intersections between class, climate change and geographical scale.

I analyse class and geography from two different vantage points: stratification and Marxist analysis. A stratification approach discloses the irony that people living in the ‘world's greenest cities’ in the global North—especially considering carbon footprint analyses—are indeed far from living the most sustainable lives. Conversely, poor people in the global South, who suffer most from its consequences, do not get to live in the ‘world's greenest cities’—although they have the world's lowest carbon footprints and are arguably least responsible for climate change. A stratification approach can help reveal important contradictions of urban sustainability, but to understand the widespread popularity of urban sustainability in the global North, we also need to explore class from a Marxist perspective.

While a stratification approach reveals inequalities as a definition of class, a Marxist approach sees this as consequences of the exploitation and domination that exist in relations between capitalist and worker (see Bensaïd, 2002; Crompton, 2008; Wright, 2015). A Marxist approach defines those who accumulate capital as a class, namely the capitalist class, noting that the capitalist class comes with distinct class fractions and that urban policies always have a class character. In this article, I analyse this perspective based on geographical scales to argue that capitalists and state managers attempting to portray their actions as ‘green’ are more likely to come into conflict with the fossil fuel industry at a national scale than at an urban scale. My main argument is therefore that the urban is the scale where the capitalist class and the (local) state can do things that may be considered ‘sustainable’ within a broader fossil-fuel-based economy, without confronting the power of the fossil fuel industry. Put bluntly, the urban is the scale at which actors can most easily profit from stopping global warming—without actually having to stop global warming.

To arrive at this this argument, I propose three interventions in the literature on urban sustainability. The first is methodological: I take inspiration from Angelo and Wachsmuth's (2015: 16) critique of ‘methodological cityism’—that urban environmental research has been too narrowly focused within city boundaries—to propose that urban sustainability be analysed both within the broader political economy and in relation to other geographical scales. The second intervention I propose is to use class as a starting point to examine and criticize the rising popularity of ‘urban sustainability’. There are indeed references to class in the literature—for example, when urban sustainability benefits a so-called ‘middle class’, or when it leads to eco-gentrification. However, class is seldom the main vantage point, and explicit discussions on class theory are rare. Thirdly, class analysis (guided by a stratification approach) allows us to see why urban sustainability might flourish in the global North and reveal (through a Marxist class approach) that urban sustainability comes with a time and place. By examining the role of the capitalist class in urban sustainability, we can see how time and place are not coincidence, but an integral part of much-discussed processes such as post-industrialization, urban entrepreneurialism and neoliberalism (see Harvey, 1990; Smith, 1996).

In this article I focus primarily on policymakers, politicians and groups of people who own and accumulate capital. Broader discussions on, for example, social movements and everyday life will be left for future studies. My critique of what I call the ‘world's greenest’ is based on general discourse analysis, while my analysis on the production of urban sustainability is based on previous case studies by myself and other authors, with a focus, though not exclusively, on Scandinavia. I also draw on personal professional experience from previous work on sustainability as an urban planner in a Scandinavian city. However, the validity of these arguments goes beyond the local Scandinavian context.

The article consists of two main sections. In the first I focus on a stratification approach to class, using the ‘world's greenest’ discourse as an entry point to provide a critique of urban sustainability. In the second section I introduce a Marxist approach to class and examine how the urban can be the scale at which interactions between the capitalist class and (local) politicians can more easily be coloured green in the face of climate change.

Urban sustainability and the ‘world's greenest’

Sustainability as it is known today is a child of the 1980s. Modern urban environmentalism often started as progressive local movements. These first became institutionalized in the 1980s and even further in the 1990s. Critique of growth associated with Limits to Growth1 vanished when the Brundtland report started making sustainability mainstream 15 years later.2 The critiques of cities often found in Deep Ecology during the 1970s lost popularity as cities increasingly became part of the solution to ecological crises. The Brundtland report not only indicated that economic growth was not a problem: it was clear that growth (economic sustainability) was needed to achieve ecological sustainability. From the early 1990s onwards, sustainability became an integrated and integral part of capital accumulation. With programmes such as Agenda 21, the Millennium Development Goals and the UN's 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, it became a truism that cities both contributed to the problems and could play progressive roles in the face of global warming. Recently, concepts such as resilience and smart cities have vitalized urban sustainability, especially in interactions between academic discourses and policy fields (on the history of urban sustainability, see, e.g. Bulkeley, 2006; Jonas et al., 2011; Vojnovic, 2014; Angelo and Wachsmuth, 2020).

Urban sustainability is an ‘elusive concept’ (Hassan and Lee, 2015) that comes in various guises, such as the ‘climate-smart city’ (Davidson and Gleeson, 2014), ‘eco-city’ (Cugurullo, 2018), ‘zero-carbon city’ and ‘ubiquitous eco-city’ (or ‘U-eco-city’) (Hassan and Lee, 2015; for overviews on the literature on urban sustainability, see also, e.g. Krueger and Gibbs, 2007; Andersson, 2016; Hult, 2017; Rapoport and Hult, 2017; Rosol et al., 2017). Here, urban sustainability is used as a general concept that describes interests in, for example, ecology and climate on an urban scale. However, when working with general and elusive concepts, it is important to work with concrete and particular entry points. My starting point here is an analysis of urban sustainability though the lens of the ‘world's greenest’ discourse, which refers to the prizes and awards, prestige and attention given to cities, city districts or particular urban projects for being, for example, the ‘best’, ‘leading’, ‘most environmentally friendly’ or ‘most sustainable’. This is a fruitful entry point for several reasons: it is an important discourse in its own right, exemplifies the popularity of ‘sustainability’ at urban scales, reveals interactions between environmental organizations, business and policy (and sometimes even academic discussion) and helps us understand both the strengths and limitations of a stratification approach to class.

These accolades are neither always on a global scale nor always green. But I call it the ‘world's greenest’ as the logic of the competition is to be the best, while the word ‘green’ refers to a visual sensation of benign environmental policies or actions without a priori implying the involvement of any sort of actual ecological improvements (see Holgersen and Malm, 2015).

The prizes are awarded by different organizations. Some are conferred by environmental organizations (such as WWF's ‘One Planet City Challenge’ and ‘Earth Hour City Challenge’), or research organizations (such as the Worldwatch Institute's ‘Role models’ in State of the World),3 others by websites such as Treehugger's ‘America's 10 Most Sustainable Cities’ or the Sustainable Living Guide's ‘17 Most Sustainable Cities In The World’).4 Some awards come from the UN (such as UN-Habitat) and the UN in collaboration with cities (for example, The Dubai International Award for Best Practices, or DIABP). Some are commissioned by major private capitalist companies, such as Siemens, which is behind both the European Green City Index and the Asian Green City Index (Siemens AG, 2009; Pow and Neo, 2015), and others through international exhibitions (such as Expo). Others, meanwhile, gain attention through media, such as Växjö, which mobilized after the BBC called it ‘the greenest city in Europe’ in 2007 (Andersson, 2016: 1197). Even journals, web pages and travel guides produce lists of ‘world's greenest’ and reproduce others (such as travel.earth and afar.com). According to the Euronews travel site, for example, the five ‘world's greenest locations’ are Copenhagen and Madrid in Europe, Dubai in Asia, and Brisbane and Canberra in Australia (Palmer, 2021).

Furthermore, there is an inflation in this system—the ‘Bilbao effect’ or ‘Barcelona model’ (see Pow and Neo, 2015: 132)—which reflects the massive popularity of urban sustainability. Between the early 1990s and 2002, over 6,000 local governments from 113 countries adopted sustainability initiatives (Krueger and Gibbs, 2007). We can assume that this has increased since 2002. In 2015 there were arguably ‘well over 200 “eco-city” projects only in China’ (Pow and Neo, 2015: 134).

This inflation can be further exemplified by the 19% increase in ‘green building certification’ between 2020 and 2022 (UNEP, 2022: 20) and by the case of Sweden, where Malmö, Gothenburg, Stockholm, Uppsala, Växjö and Lund have all recently received prestigious international prizes for urban sustainability. As of 2021, members of the World Green Building Council administered 74 ‘green building certification systems’, from Casa Guatemala and the Green Pyramid Rating System in Egypt to BREEAM (Building Research Establishment Environmental Assessment Methodology)—all in the global North (ibid.: 53–55). Additionally, there are numerous regional and national prizes.5

According to the Green City Times, ‘Sustainability is the most important topic facing humanity today. Embracing sustainability means embracing our future, whereas ignoring it means accepting the status quo’ (Green City Times, 2023; emphasis added). The journal then presents the world's ten ‘greenest cities’: Reykjavik (Iceland), Växjö (Sweden), Freiburg (Germany), Vancouver (Canada), Copenhagen (Denmark), London (UK), Curitiba (Brazil), Portland (Oregon, US), San Diego (California, US) and Oslo (Norway). The list is worth mentioning because it is so typical: all ten cities conventionally circulate on similar lists. Other ‘typical’ winners are cities such as Amsterdam, Berlin, Stockholm and Vienna.

So, let's start by pointing out the geography. Sustainable cities are—with a few exceptions (often Bogotá)—affluent cities in the global North. This might arguably be changing, as the focus has exploded in ‘emerging markets’ such as China (Pow and Neo, 2015) and the Middle East (Rapoport and Hult, 2017; see also Blok, 2012). The key point is that affluent cities ‘embrace the future’. Others don't.

Sometimes cities can receive awards for investments and policies that predate the world's greenest discourse by decades (for example, Freiburg, Växjö and Copenhagen, see Anderberg and Clark, 2013; Andersson, 2016). For other cities, such as Malmö (see Holgersen and Malm, 2015) and Vancouver (see Affolderbach and Schulz, 2017), networking was crucial to promote themselves as world-leading green cities. Place branding is important for winning prizes, and winning prizes is important for place branding (Bulkeley, 2006). Often it is hard to say which criteria were used to declare a winner, but when criteria are explicit, they include innovative comprehensive (sustainability) plans, new local tram/railway lines or bicycle tracks, innovative recycling systems, establishing parks or building more energy efficiently. A key element is access to funding to implement large-scale environmental projects (Andersson, 2016: 1202). Funding can come from the municipality itself, national and international funds, or—this important for the analysis below—in alliance with businesses (for an overview of winning criteria, see Andersson, 2016).

This ‘competition’ is about something more than simply which local politicians are most concerned about the environment. It is no accident that ‘the world's greenest’ tend to be affluent cities, as resources are a common denominator in playing this game.6 It costs to build the most energy-efficient tram or produce the most cutting-edge policy document. Cities need money to win.7

Stratification critiques of urban sustainability

Celebrating affluent cities in the global North as the ‘world's greenest’ requires a particular way of understanding emissions, class and geography. Distinctions between production-based and consumption-based approaches to measuring emissions mean that, simply put, if a telephone is produced in China and consumed in Sweden, the emissions from a production-based perspective will be placed in China and from a consumption-based perspective in Sweden. These are not neutral measurement techniques, but come with social, political and geographical implications (Holgersen and Hult, 2021).

For affluent cities to be the greenest, we must ignore the consumption perspective—in other words, we need to ignore that much wealth and prosperity in these cities rests on an inflow of cheap commodities from elsewhere (Holgersen and Malm, 2015). The ‘green’ transformation in so-called post-industrial cities has always depended upon commodity production elsewhere, not least the global South. Fossil fuels, to be clear, are used in most stages of these global activities: from production of factories and commodities to the ships that brings them to ‘green cities’. That such emissions are invisible in affluent landscapes has become a key premise of the ‘world's greenest’ discourse (Holgersen and Hult, 2021; on ecologically unequal exchange, see Warlenius, 2017).

From a production-based perspective, cities can compete with themselves (has our city improved on this or that?) and/or with other affluent cities (have we improved more than others?). Relevant topics include: improving public transport, water management and energy efficiency, introducing solar panels in the urban landscape and articulating the most progressive comprehensive plans. By contrast, from a consumption-based perspective, cities compete with all other cities around the globe. When measuring carbon footprints, inhabitants in affluent cities suddenly compete with the two billion people living with no or poor access to electricity (Energi og Klima, 2021). But these people do not live in the world's greenest cities. They cannot. If ‘world's greenest’ awards reflected their carbon footprints, the whole competition would implode.

When the UK-based price comparison service Uswitch produced their list of five ‘most sustainable cities’, they even included the world's two ‘least sustainable cities’. One reason for declaring New Delhi, India, as the second least sustainable city was that up to ‘50 per cent of residents live in slums without access to proper water supply or waste management’ (Palmer, 2021: npn). This makes sense within the Brundtland version of sustainability, where fighting poverty and fighting ecological problems always go hand in hand.

There are indeed environmental concerns in slums: residents are extra vulnerable to ‘natural’ disasters and suffer from environmental pollution in the surrounding natural habitat, recreational spaces, agricultural land and water (Angelo and Wachsmuth, 2020). Moreover, there is a lack of healthcare, infrastructure and public services (see also Davis, 2006). But when we analyse climate change from a consumption-based perspective it is precisely the New Delhi slums—or those outside Mexico City or Cairo, the favelas in Rio, or Mathare in Nairobi, not to mention the poorest parts of Kinshasa—that are among the world's most climate-friendly urban locations. However, it would be absurd and grotesque to award them for being the ‘world's greenest’: poverty is nothing to celebrate. But this absurdity does point to a massive problem that is endemic to the ‘world's greenest’ and urban sustainability discourses.

In terms of class theory, analyses using carbon footprints are based on a stratification approach. This approach can be characterized as describing differences between people through categories based on, for example, income, education, tenure form or housing prices, and then ordering people hierarchically. Some sort of stratification is arguably central to all class analysis, but only doing so can be classified as ‘stratification’.8

Similar arguments can be articulated within affluent cities. The city districts most often described as ‘greenest’ in Sweden are Western Harbour in Malmö, and Hammarby Sjöstad and Norra Djurgårdsstaden in Stockholm. Residents of these affluent districts earn higher wages, have more living space and more cars than the city average, and we know that affluence is closely correlated with consumption of both raw materials and energy (on Malmö, see Holgersen and Malm, 2015; for the example of Portland, Oregon, in the United States, see Goodling et al., 2015). Even ecologically conscious rich people are responsible for high emissions: they might climate-compensate air travel but fly the most; they might own hybrid cars but have more cars; they might cover their cottages with solar panels but have more second and third homes, and so on (Holgersen, 2023a).

It is hardly a new trend that lower parts of the working class, stigmatized minorities and people exposed to racism live in the least environmentally healthy places. In nineteenth-century industrial cities it was the workers who lived closest to local sources of environmental pollution (Jonas et al., 2011). And today, in much-praised urban sustainable Portland, ‘roughly 600,000 residents lack regular access to hallmarks of the sustainable city, such as fresh and healthy food, safe neighbourhoods, convenient transit, and affordable housing’ (Goodling et al., 2015: 505). The Portland case also shows how even racialized social inequalities are produced through urban sustainability (see also Bradley, 2009).

Stratification and carbon footprint analysis reveals that the richest 1% of the population in Sweden are responsible for emitting an average of 43 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalents per person per year, while the average for Sweden is 8 tonnes. Between 1990 and 2015, the poorest 50% of the Swedish population reduced their emissions by 16%, while the richest 50% increased their emissions by 11% (Oxfam, 2021). That affluent areas are the greenest is a farce, and this farce becomes a tragedy when global perspectives are included: per capita averages in countries such as Congo, Somalia and Burundi are 0.03 tonnes (Energi og Klima, 2021).

When emissions are analysed within a global political geography, the argument can even be taken a step further. Cities never exist in isolated vacuums. The poverty experienced in cities such as New Delhi is (in)directly linked to the wealth experienced in the greenest cities in the global North. Global poverty is not only produced in the South, but via various (neo)imperial relations; affluence in the global North is deeply connected to this very ‘climate-friendly impoverishment’. Additionally, there seem to be numerous ways the negative consequences of climate change ‘move’ from places where people have higher carbon footprints to where they have lower carbon footprints.9 Global warming will affect poor farmers, Indigenous people, slum-dwellers, women and people of colour inordinately. But as Kyle Powys Whyte (2020: 56) reminds us, even projects for carbon footprint reduction might ‘repeat the moral wrongs and injustices of the past’.

To understand why urban sustainability comes with a class character, and how this relates to the vast popularity of urban sustainability in the first place, we need to move beyond a stratification approach to class. One major problem with ‘best practice urban sustainability’, says Harriet Bulkeley (2006: 1040), is that it is often discussed as if the problems and solutions are already out there, they only need to be learned, distributed and implemented (see also Cugurullo, 2018). If we seek to understand how urban sustainability is produced, it is beneficial to turn to a Marxist approach to class.

Class and urban sustainability: a Marxist critique

The Marxist starting points for class analysis are the relations between capitalists and workers and the concepts of exploitation (which means workers receive less in salary than the value they produce) and domination (which is the power over or controlling of someone else's activity) (see Bensaïd, 2002; Crompton, 2008; Wright, 2015; Therborn, 2018; Durou, 2020). In terms of this analysis, class does not equal inequality, as in a stratification approach; instead, class produces inequality. Before I examine how class also produces urban sustainability, and what the implications are, I make four general arguments.

First, urban policy is a condensation of class relations. Class is not merely an outcome of urban policies; class produces and constitutes policies in the first place. We can approach the class character of urban policy from two vantage points, one that emphasizes personal relations (inspired by Miliband, 1973) or another that emphasizes structures (Poulantzas, 2000). Anyone familiar with local/urban politics knows how much personal background and relations matter, and also that local states in capitalism hardly have any choice but to attract capital, taxes, wealth and/or jobs for various reasons (see, e.g. Cockburn, 1977; Smith, 1996; Fainstein, 2001). Local states must facilitate capital accumulation, not least to enable it to pay for public services and keep the local state functioning. But this can be done in very different ways: in terms of policy, over space and time, and through different actors. This depends, for example, on which fractions of the capitalist class and which non-capitalist forces are involved (labour unions, community groups, religious communities and many other parts of hegemonic regimes). The local state must therefore also reproduce foundational class relations in capitalism—and is a place where power struggles play out. In this respect, urban planning and policies are material condensations of social relations (see Hall et al., 1978; Holgersen, 2015).

Second, there is the role of class fractions. One way of classifying the heterogenous capitalist class is by dividing it into subcategories such as financial capital, manufacturing capital, landlords and rentier capital (see, e.g. Poulantzas, 1973). Concerning climate change, the emphasis must be on primitive fossil capital: a certain class fraction that supplies fossil fuel to the market (see Malm, 2016; Malm and the Zetkin Collective, 2021). This differs from fossil capital in general, which is not a class fraction because it is the generality of capital. As the economy relies on primitive fossil capital—commonly referred to as the ‘fossil industry’—to continue flooding the economy with fuel, this is a very powerful sector within contemporary capitalism. ‘It has a venerable history not only of fulfilling its economic task, but also of acting as a political force, using its narrow composition and centralized operations to bend governments to its will, or just whisper in their ears’ (Malm and the Zetkin Collective, 2021: 17). This is often done more directly in countries with a strong fossil industry (such as Norway, Canada and Poland) and more indirectly elsewhere.

Third, the capitalist class produces climate change. The capitalist class, in a Marxist sense, does not exist in pure stratification approaches, where the richest 1%—or top 5% or 10%—can be classified as the ‘upper class’. The capitalist class in a Marxist approach is not a class because they are ‘rich’, ‘educated’, ‘insiders’, or share a common culture. They are a class because they own and control the means of production and make decisions and investments on its behalf (or delegate these tasks to other leaders while maintaining primary responsibility). This produces a different approach to measuring emissions. Between 1988 and 2015, a mere 100 companies contributed 71% of global emissions (Griffin, 2017). Furthermore, 63% of all cumulative global emissions of industrial carbon dioxide and methane between 1751 and 2010 can be traced to 90 ‘units’, 50 of which were owned by private capitalists, while 31 were state-owned companies and nine were owned by nation-states (see Climate Accountability, 2021).

Now we can identify limitations to stratification approaches and analyses based on carbon footprints. On webpages such as climatehero.me you can calculate your own climate footprint in five minutes; you can register what you eat, but not whether you own a business. An owner of an airplane company can, during work hours, decide to invest in 100 new planes, put millions into commercials and lobbying politicians to further facilitate the aviation industry. When the workday is over, this person might drive a Tesla home to an ecologically designed building with solar panels and eat vegan food. According to consumption-based ways of measuring emissions, this person lives an eco-friendly life (see Huber, 2022; Warlenius, 2022).

Capitalists change the world differently—and more dramatically—as a class than as individuals. As single individuals, the richest among us have the highest carbon footprint. And as single capitalists, they create certain places in their own image. But it is only as a class that they create a world in their own image (Holgersen, 2024). As individuals, capitalists can demolish a piece of land, or pollute a city or a river, but larger ecological crises are only possible because the destruction of nature is part of a broader system. This is the world of global trade networks and infrastructure, mass production, international division of labour, an energy system that serves an exponentially growing economy, interconnected financial centres and more.

Only as a class can capitalists produce global warming. No single capitalist could have done it alone. It requires capitalists to perform their main class activity—capital accumulation—within a broader capitalist organization of society. This does not happen primarily because personal fortunes are astronomical; it is possible only because one class dominates both people and nature. At an urban scale, rich individuals—or single capitalists—can build certain buildings or even city districts. But it is only as a capitalist class that they actually contribute to producing the ‘sustainable city’.

Fourth, we have to consider the combined and uneven historical geography of urban sustainability. At one level all cases of urban sustainability are different. For some cities, such as Växjö, urban sustainability is very much about city branding (Andersson, 2016), while for Stockholm and Oslo it is very much about positioning the city internationally. Sometimes, as Laidley (2007) explains in the case of Toronto, well-intended sustainable projects become dominated by economic motives. But sometimes, as Holgersen and Malm (2015) show in the case of Malmö, it is the other way around: urban policies are painted green to get out of economic crises. Sometimes green place branding is initiated by ‘public–private networks’ (Andersson, 2016: 1209). In some other cases ‘state–capital’ distinctions can be unclear (as in the case of ‘semi-governmental agencies’—see Rapoport and Hult, 2017: 1789). At other times state–capital collaborations are praised explicitly—for example, when Paris won the Global Earth Hour Capital 2016 title for ‘its successful engagement with business’ (WWF, 2016).

At another level, some underlying processes tie all this together. There have been so many different coalitions between politicians and capital promoting urban sustainability that this must be explained as a general phenomenon. It is not a coincidence that environmental urban initiatives gained broader significance in the wake of the crisis of Fordism and the rise of neoliberalism (Davidson and Gleeson, 2014; Rosol et al., 2017). Urban sustainability comes with a time and place. It is an integrated part of much-discussed processes such as post-industrialization, urban entrepreneurialism and neoliberalism.

Class is much more than an outcome of said processes, as Harvey (1990) reminds us; class activities produced this context in the first place. When some fractions of the capital class moved production to the global South, others—sometimes the same capitalists—invested in these ‘abundant places’. ‘Sustainability’ became increasingly part of what Neil Smith (1996: 39) called the ‘class-remake of the central urban landscape’ (see also While et al., 2004; Goodling et al., 2015). When cities aimed to attract a certain set of people—‘entrepreneurs’, ‘tax-payers’, ‘students’, ‘creative class’ and so on—urban sustainability became a method of filtering who is welcome and who isn't (see the literature on eco-gentrification by Dooling, 2009; Goodling et al., 2015).

Urban sustainability looks different in different places but comes with a general class character. It reflects the geographical dimensions of capitalism, where abstract space is produced while new geographies and landscapes are created (Lefebvre, 1991; Smith, 1991), where places are developed unevenly and combined, and where class constantly intersects with other social relations (such as race and gender).

How the urban is the ‘greenest’ scale

Cities receive so much attention for their work on sustainability that it is easy to forget that they are not the most important scale concerning climate change. Nation-states are currently the most important political bodies when it comes to mitigating ecological crisis, and the question is inherently global.10 It is central governments that possess the political power to implement the needed interventions at the scale and pace that is required to stop global warming, not to mention the monetary and fiscal instruments to enable and steer the massive investments required (see, e.g. Warlenius, 2022; Holgersen, 2024). This is where we often find the overall responsibility and regulatory framework to remake the geography in countries; nation-states are themselves responsible for emissions. For example, of the 90 ‘units’ most responsible for global emissions historically described above, 40 are state-owned companies or nation-states (Climate Accountability, 2021) and most not-yet-developed offshore oil resources are under state control (Ryggvik, 2021). Many governments massively subsidize fossil fuels. Globally, government subsidies amounted to USD7 trillion in 2022, equivalent to nearly 7.1% of global GDP11 (Black et al., 2023: 3). Additionally, critical environmentalists have long argued that putting the fossil industry out of business ‘begins with a nationalization of all private companies extracting and processing and distributing fossil fuel’ (Malm, 2020: 139, emphasis added). The most important arena for stopping global warming is international negotiation, for this is the context in which countries and nation-states meet.

The vast popularity of ‘the worlds greenest’ discourse, examined above, does not find its equivalent at other scales. (Neither is there a comparable focus on the sustainability achievements of the countryside.) Oslo and Vancouver, for instance, have both been awarded ‘worlds greenest’ prizes, but it would be rather strange if countries such as Norway or Canada received similar awards. Why is the urban easier to colour green? One hypothesis could be that politicians and other power holders at the urban scale are generally more concerned about nature than their peers in rural areas or at other geographical scales. I do not think this is the case.

Another hypothesis could be that environmental activists are more likely to influence policy and planning at the urban scale. This is an interesting argument, but insufficient to explain the matter, as the largest environmental/climate groups mostly work at national and even international scales, while local environmental groups are very often critical when ‘their’ cities are celebrated as the world's greenest. And why do small and self-sustained eco-villages not get the same attention as urban sustainability endeavours, despite their admirable activism?

There might—as is so often the case—be several reasons. In the next section I explore the following hypothesis: The urban is the scale where capitalists can most easily accumulate capital without confronting the power of the fossil industry. Owing to the geography of fossil fuel and capitalism, this is the scale where policies can most easily be coloured green. In other words, scrutinizing relations between the capitalist class, geography and political power is crucial to understanding the popularity of urban sustainability.

Producing urban sustainability: geography and class fractions

When it comes to urban sustainability, geography certainly matters. The travel industry might have trouble greenwashing flying (although this does happen). It is far easier to green the destinations. So while emissions from flying (if included) often fall on nations, airports are usually associated with regions and can be greened, such as when Oslo Airport was the ‘world's first airport building to achieve the BREEAM Excellent sustainability rating’ (Climate Action, 2023). But greening the airport is still harder than greening the transport to and from the airport, which is more associated with the city and with urban sustainability. In Stockholm, Arlanda Express has had several campaigns saying ‘We are CO₂-neutral’ and that the greenhouse gas emissions they fail to reduce will be offset by investing in Gold Standard certified projects (A-Train, 2023).

Geography matters in the service industry too. Waitressing is associated with the place (city) where the restaurant is located and produces low emissions. But the emissions from the cow that is served are more associated with farming. This can be attributed to spatial myopia (see Holgersen and Hult, 2021). Sometimes geography matters simply because implications are larger at more general geographical scales. So, while congestion taxes and pedestrianizing streets might be disputed processes, they can be celebrated by local capital and local politicians for bringing logistical advantages or better shopping opportunities. Measures at this scale can be accepted by the car industry. National restrictions on car use would, however, be quite a different matter.

The geography of labour also matters. In cities that are more based on finance, education, services, and so on, politicians can rhetorically be ‘against oil’ without taking on the risk of losing support among workers in the fossil fuel industries. This is of course more the case in cities such as Oslo or Edinburgh than in Stavanger or Aberdeen. It is not a coincidence that most of the ‘green cities’ discussed in the first section of this article do not have a substantial working class employed in the fossil fuel sector. On a national scale, political campaigns ‘against’ fossil fuels may alienate workers in the fossil fuel industry, or in sectors heavily dependent on it, regardless of where they live.

Rapoport and Hult (2017: 1780, 1787) have studied how urban sustainability is ‘made’ to travel by the Global Intelligence Corps (GIC), identified as a ‘small community of property developers, architects, planners and academics, working within transnational architecture, engineering and property development firms, who draw upon each other's work in planning and building urban megaprojects around the world’. Companies here contribute to making sure that projects deliver financial returns, and the GIC's services ‘do not come cheap’ (ibid.: 1785). This explains the strong presence of the GIC not only in the global North, but also in China, India and the Middle East—places undergoing rapid urbanization and integration into global capitalist social relations. Geographical scale is crucial here too, as it is at the urban scale that sustainability can be most easily commodified. When the national Swedish Trade Council tried to export Swedish sustainability, this took the form of exporting sustainable urbanism. SymbioCity was established to make ‘the “Swedish sustainable city” a commodity for export to an international market’ (Rapoport and Hult, 2017: 1789). Whether this succeeded is another question. Here I simply say that it is hard to imagine how state managers might export ‘Swedish’ sustainability.

Landlords are a class fraction central to urban development. This class fraction typically earns its profits from urban land rent, which does not directly contribute to emissions.12 Anderson et al. (2022) have examined how landowners, developers and the local state work together to pursue class monopoly rent through a variety of environmental policies and practices, referring to sustainability as a ‘tool of class power’ (ibid.: 1119). Seeing urban land rent as ‘green’ ignores, of course, as Marx ([1894] 1981) shows in Capital, that profits from rents ultimately derive from labour utilizing nature to produce surplus value.

Another central fraction is the construction sector. From a climate perspective, the greenest building is arguably the one that is already built (Elefante, 2012: 64), but the number of prizes given to maintaining buildings is marginal compared to those given to newly constructed buildings. This relates to the size and power of the construction industry: ‘commercial real estate’ was globally the second biggest industry by employment in 2023: about 13% of the world's GDP is spent on construction-related goods and services, the sector employs 7% of the world's working-age population and is huge in terms of emissions, representing an estimated 37% of global operational energy and process-related CO₂ emissions (UNEP, 2022: 37; see also McKinsey Global Institute, 2017; Marsh, 2021; Ibisworld, 2023).

That the construction sector is such an important source of emissions complicates my hypothesis that the urban is the scale where capital can most easily be ‘green’. Two arguments are important here. First, the sector is very well suited to measuring emissions in a production-based approach (not least with energy consumption of housing) and innovative architecture is very easy to communicate in media—important aspects in the ‘world's greenest’ discourse. Secondly, the construction sector that is discussed as ‘green’ builds housing, offices and local infrastructure, and sometimes hotels and shopping centres. However, the construction sector also builds airports, factories, highways and oil platforms. These are neither considered green nor associated with an urban scale. Additionally, the sector has for years had problems with low increases in productivity (McKinsey Global Institute, 2017); in this respect, building ‘sustainably’ (alongside constructing luxury homes) could be an attempt to innovate and develop the sector (for discussion about this in Sweden, see Fundament, 2023).

A premise within urban sustainability is that the focus remains on surfaces and facades. It is conventional in ‘world's greenest’ discourses to discuss how much energy a building consumes, but from a stratification approach we can discuss what people within the building consume. From a Marxist perspective, we must ask: What do people in the building actually do, and who owns the building in the first place? Construction remains a central component in urban sustainability, not least because it remains at the surface. This is how Equinor's new headquarters in Oslo can be branded as ‘very low energy consumption’ (A-Lab, n.d.). Its oil rigs, pipelines and supply boats, meanwhile, are less likely to get green awards. And its oil production infrastructure is kept well away from the office buildings, which are often placed in affluent cities, surrounded by landscaped gardens.

Sustainability thrives at an urban scale because it is integrated into what is often called the neoliberal city, urban entrepreneurialism or the ‘post-industrial city’. The case of Malmö in Sweden transforming from an ‘industrial’ to a ‘post-industrial’ city in the 1990s is relevant here. The city originally tried out much of the ‘neoliberal city’ repertoire: attracting capital in terms of events, finance, culture, tourists, students (by establishing a new university), and so on. But partly to their own surprise, ‘ecological sustainability’ helped it gain international attention, and this attention further reinforced the focus on anything green (Holgersen, 2017). Sustainability was originally one strategy among others and this reminds us that urban sustainability is not a trans-geographical or trans-historical concept, but rather a specifically situated way of discussing capitalist urban development—one that has unfolded in the global North since the 1990s.

One main argument in this article—that it is harder to ‘green’ (or greenwash) a nation than a city without confronting the interests of the primitive fossil capital—does not mean nations cannot also be ‘greened’ (or greenwashed). Or that some cities could not care less about greening. But one reason it is easier on one scale than on any other is that politics and capital–state formations look different at various scales. It is harder to circumvent questions of the military, national energy security, energy-intensive heavy industries, aviation industries, industrial agriculture, mining, the logistics and transport industry, and so on, at a national scale than an urban one. This becomes even harder when we include international relations, where global capitalism is built on transport—fuelled by fossils—and countries seek to position themselves financially and geopolitically. While (neoliberal) cities compete over attention, investments or attracting companies, nation-states also compete over resources, secure energy sources, geopolitics and economic growth on aggregated levels. Whereas cities can compete over specific forms of capital, nation-states must, to a larger degree, manage the general interest of the whole capitalist class. At national and even many regional scales, ‘green’ policies are more likely to come into confrontation with primitive fossil capital.

Class and geography matters: implications for urban theory

If my analysis is on the right track, what are the implications for urban theory and academic knowledge more broadly? One is that (a Marxist understanding of) class should not be ignored when discussing urban theory or urban sustainability. Another is that Angelo and Wachsmuth's (2015) critique of ‘methodological cityism’ should be developed further, especially in relation to class.

Given the critique outlined earlier in this article, should future research be framed ‘against’ urban sustainability? This would be problematic, because several components associated with sustainability, and much of the knowledge accumulated among people who ‘work with sustainability’, are indeed needed in the face of climate change: more energy-efficient housing, fewer cars and more public transport, for example. However, we must rethink the subject matter. On the basis of earlier discussions on sustainability, I wish to proceed with three key discussions: (1) profit and the measurement of emissions, (2) the role of consumption, and (3) urban sustainability as a way of living with the climate crisis.

Within consumption-based approaches to emissions the main actors are individuals, while within a production-based approach they are countries. But we also need a class-based approach. Allesson (2021) has suggested a profit-based model of carbon accounting emissions—measuring emissions based on who profits from the emission. Based on a thorough analysis that frames profit making as a class activity, this represents a significant contribution. Measuring emissions in this way would undoubtedly be a complex task, similar to production- and consumption-based calculations, which could be even more complicated than what we have explored here. A major challenge in urban sustainability is that policies and projects are mainly implemented if they are both ‘green’ and profitable, or—in the case of cities—when they are both ‘green’ and aimed at attracting capital, prizes, awards or attention. A profit-based approach to emissions provides a valuable tool for understanding and critiquing these premises in current urban sustainability.

Consumption continues to haunt Marxists and recently played a central role in disputes over ‘degrowth’ or ‘Promethean’ socialism (see, e.g. Warlenius, 2022; Holgersen, 2023b). While most Marxists would argue that production is more important than consumption, this does not mean that consumption is irrelevant or reactionary (for example, that it could be reduced to ‘middle-class moralism’—see Huber, 2022). Consumption is important for several reasons. Ontologically, capitalism cannot exist without it. Arguments emphasizing the demand side of urban sustainability—how prices for eco-houses, eco-commodities or eco-services exclude a majority from ‘living sustainably’ or buying or ‘being’ ecological—are not mutually exclusive from more classical Marxist approaches scrutinizing how profit motivates production in the first place. Urban planning and policy are concerned with ‘collective’ and personal consumption, which come with class characters that must be understood and criticized. And historically, of course, class struggle has always also been about consumption and includes struggles over housing, rent and food, and more. It is indeed not easy to navigate, but future studies in urban theory would benefit from starting from the fact that production is more important, but consumption is also important.

One reason Marxists might hesitate to bring consumption in is because it then becomes hard to avoid questions about whether parts of the working class in the global North must also reduce their consumption of certain goods. However, a focus on consumption also opens possibilities for radical interventions. Aversion to conspicuous luxury consumption is already a source of class antagonism. Calls to ban private airplanes, ban owning more than two homes, introduce luxury-taxes of all kinds, and so on, are gaining traction. The urban sustainability I discuss in this article is all about carrots, never sticks. If everyone should have the right to ‘consume’ approximately the same amount of nature while keeping global warming under 1.5 degrees, emissions must be reduced to a maximum of 1 tonne of carbon dioxide equivalent per person per year within a decade (Oxfam, 2021). Are there enough prizes and awards—or carrots—to get the 1% in Sweden to reduce their climate emissions by 95%? We certainly need something other than carrots. Class-based critiques of urban sustainability should articulate critiques of both the rich and the owners of the means of production. The former lean towards analysis of stratification and consumption, the latter to Marxism and production, but I think it is crucial for future studies to explore how these are interlinked theoretically, empirically and politically.

Is urban sustainability a way of living with the climate crisis? The climate crisis is such that most agree we need to do something now. Urban sustainability is an answer to this call. To transform cities might sound like a dramatic intervention in some imagined status quo. But the status quo under capitalism is that landscapes must change. The capitalist class need to change cities to reproduce capitalism. Class is a crucial, but to some degree overlooked, component of what While et al. (2004) call the ‘sustainability fix’ and what Holgersen and Malm (2015) call the ‘green fix’. What is being ‘fixed’ are not only economic concerns or crises, but class relations too. ‘Green fix’ is what the capitalist class does to reproduce itself.

If my hypothesis is correct—that the urban is the scale where the capitalist class can most effectively accumulate capital without confronting the fossil industry, while also reproducing hegemonic class relations—the question arises: Is the current version of urban sustainability primarily about changing space while reproducing social relations? Or, to put it another way: Is it a way of coming to terms with change and living with and living in the crisis without solving it or altering class power? Should urban sustainability primarily be understood as a way of organizing urban life in affluent cities under the Anthropocene? Future research would benefit from building on this and taking it one step further: Are the ‘world's greenest’ discourses legitimizing an unsustainable way of life?

Concluding remarks

Urban sustainability has become a limited territorial response to problems that are acute at other scales. Capitalists can finance, develop, construct and design housing, offices, infrastructure and parks and recreation, and thereby produce ‘sustainable urban landscapes’, while the overall usage of fossil fuel in society continues uninterrupted. The urban is the scale where alliances between capital and the (local) state can advance without having to directly engage with the question of whether fossil fuel can exist or not. Capital can simply be ‘greener’ in contemporary cities. Urban landscapes can be communicated to be in opposition to fossil capital in general, without having to confront the fossil industry.

There is a division of labour within the capitalist class. Some capitalists (and class fractions) can accumulate ‘green’ at an urban scale, while others continue to pour oil, gas and coal into the system at large. This is possible as the capitalist class must be understood to be as flexible as the capitalist mode of production itself: some companies and class fractions can invest in ‘saving’ the planet, while others (or sometimes even the same ones) invest in accelerating global warming.

This flexibility is evident in the UNEP 2022 Global Status Report for Buildings and Construction. Here we read that CO₂ emissions in buildings operations reached an all-time high in 2021 and that ‘green building certifications are improving’ and that focus and investments in building ‘energy efficiency’ are growing (UNEP, 2022: v, xv). Both things are true: things can get better even when things get worse. This becomes a ‘green–urban’ equivalent to discussions on absolute and relative decoupling (see, e.g. Warlenius, 2022): achieving relatively better energy efficiency is cold comfort when overall growth is so massive that total emissions continue to reach new heights.

When the same companies and politicians can invest in both saving and destroying the planet, it is because the core class activity of the capitalist class is not ‘saving the planet’, but accumulating capital.

The criteria for ‘world's greenest’ prizes and awards are often vague, with issues of mitigation and adaptation frequently conflated and used interchangeably in the discourse. While this may seem perplexing, it should no longer surprise us: the distinctions between stopping and adapting to climate change become less relevant if the primary goal is not actually addressing climate change, but rather accumulating capital and branding cities—that is, when the main focus is ‘urban sustainability’ rather than the prevention of ecological disasters.