Community Social Sustainability: Unpacking the Concept for Urban Governance and Planning

Research on social sustainability has revealed a persistent knowledge gap concerning how to institutionalize social sustainability into urban governance and planning. New knowledge capable of operationalizing social sustainability to concrete community settings and identifying how governance and planning can help building socially sustainable trajectories are needed. This inspires us to develop a typology of community social sustainability coupling relevant theory and new and extensive empirical data. At the heart of the typology are three theoretically derived foundational characteristics—neighborhood robustness, access to every‐day services, and governance structures—encompassing the most essential aspects of community social sustainability. When exploring them empirically, we find that their realization depends on joint contribution from multiple actors. The next layer of the typology thus identifies four supportive conditions strengthening the local capability to address, prioritize and build neighborhood robustness, relevant services, and governance structures. The paper ends with a guide for future research and practice.