In recent years, eco–city as a sustainable urban model has gained increasing prevalence and evolved into a hegemonic urban discourse. As a future vision of urban transformation, eco–city is being increasingly translated into concrete projects, strategies, and policies, mainstreaming urban sustainability and being replicated and proliferated across the world. This study aims to examine, by means of a discursive analytical approach, the construction of eco–city in the Swedish urban context – urban planning and development – with a particular emphasis on definitional and thematic issues, cultural bias, selectivity, framing, and political action. I use six analytical devices to guide the analysis of four documents as an empirical material. Findings show that the construction of eco–city in the Swedish urban context entails aspects of other sustainable urban models: smart city, sustainable city, green city, and compact city, making eco–city as an umbrella metaphor for such models. Also, only combining all projects, it is clear that eco–city has evolved into a comprehensive vision, embracing most of the requirements and norms set for a city to be ecological. While the concept of eco–city tends to incorporate social and cultural dimensions of urban sustainability, the prime focus remains on economic and environmental aspects – in other words, social considerations are marginal compared to economic and environmental ones. Moreover, the discourse of eco–city draws on and is informed by an array of established discourses. Building on previous discursive constructions of reality, it changes urban reality – aspects of its economic and environmental dimensions, by generating new ways of thinking about urban practices through new amalgamations of established discourses. The technological orientation of eco–city has links to urban–economic–political processes of regulation as well as involves selective framing in terms of discursive interpretation of urban–environmental crises as material processes, recontextualization of urban- economic imaginaries, reference to particular meta–discourses, and privileging of particular discursive chains. Technologically-oriented eco–city can be conceptualized as a specific urban practice which is contingent upon hegemonic discourses on the economic, technological and environmental regulation in relation to urbanization and on the agency of various actors advocating energy efficiency and green technologies and forming alliances on sustainable urban issues. Furthermore, the discourse of eco–city is exclusionary, in that it leaves out some topics and facts relating to the negative direct and indirect environmental effects of the so–called green and energy efficiency technologies. In addition, the discourse of eco–city is shaped by cultural frames associated with environmental and climate awareness and the role of technology in enabling and catalyzing sustainable urban transformation. Finally, using different mechanisms, political action has a great impact on the discourse of eco–city in relation with the environment, climate change, and shifts to low–carbon/low-energy cities. It plays a role in the expansion and success of eco–city.

ICT has become so deeply embedded into the fabric of European society – in economic, political, and socio-cultural narratives, practices, and structures – that it has been constructed as holding tremendous untapped and inestimable potential for instigating and unleashing far-reaching societal transformation, addressing key societal challenges, and solving all societal problems. It has recently been seen, given its ubiquity, as a critical driver and powerful catalyst for sustainable urban development due to its potential to enable substantial energy savings and GHG emissions reductions in most urban sectors, especially buildings. However, related to this ubiquity, there are also a lot of visions (of limited modern applicability), hopes, myths, fallacies, and oxymora, which applies for the environmental subsystem of information society where debates focus on whether ICT can advance environmental urban sustainability. There are intricate relationships and tradeoffs among the multidimensional effects of ICT for the environment that flow mostly from the use and application of ICT – e.g. energy efficiency technology - throughout the urban sphere. Regardless, the technological orientation and framing of the sustainable city and the green economy has gained dominance in European society and become prevalent in what has come to be identified or known as the discourse of ICT for sustainable urban development (ICT4SUD). The aim of this study is to carry out a critical reading of the social construction of ICT4SUD, the underlying ideology about the ICT potential in advancing environmental urban sustainability. To achieve this aim, a Foucauldian-Faircloughian discursive approach is employed to examine the selected empirical material. This approach consists of nine stages: (1) surface descriptors and contextual elements; (2) historical-diachronic dimension; (3) epistemic and cultural frames; (4) discursive constructions and discourses; (5) social actors and framing power; (6) discursive strategies; (7) discursive mechanisms; (8) political practice, knowledge, and power; and (9) ideological standpoints.As a scholarly discourse, ICT4SUD is inherently part of and influenced by economic, societal, and political structures, and produced in social interaction. ICT4SUD is thus neither paradigmatic nor value-free, but rather socio-politically situated. It is shaped by cultural frames that are conventionalized by European society and attuned to its values, and it is a matter of a pre-intellectual space where ICT and sustainability constitute salient defining factors of the dominant configuration of knowledge, institutions, and material forces of European society. Indeed, ICT4SUD is impacted by earlier representations of reality and how they were reproduced in relation to the significance of discursive constructions of ICT and sustainability issues in the broader context of European culture. Moreover, the ICT4SUD discourse plays a major role in (re)constructing the image of the ICT industry as a social actor and in defining its identity and relation with other constituents of society, in that it is relocated new roles and attributed new societal missions. The dominant framing of the reports is clearly the one advanced by the ICT industry: it is constituted into the main definer of the represented reality. Further, positioning the ICT industry as the driver of the low-carbon city/economy aids the construction of an image of leadership in creating a low carbon society. The reports’ construction of energy efficiency technology is a powerful legitimation of the ICT industry’s views and actions. In addition, the ICT4SUD discourse is exclusionary, namely a number of facts and issues pertaining to structural, indirect, and systemic effects of ICT and the associated rebound effects are left out, concealed, or neglected. Also, the discourse is inclined to be deterministic, i.e. it postulates that ICT, supported by policy, will achieve SUD while it falls short in considering social behaviour and socio-economic relationships. It moreover tends to be rhetorical – that is, it promises environmentally SUD without really having a holistic strategy to achieve that goal. Furthermore, given the scientific discourse and the legitimation capacity of computing, climatology, and sustainability indicators, one can subsume a range of social and political effects under the category of discourse mechanisms through which ICT4SUD operates, which both show the power of discourse and potentially empower the ICT industry and its cohorts. There are different justifications for the development of energy efficiency technology in relation to decision-making processes. Plus, politics, as a consequence of its interaction with ICT4SUD, forces, though different mechanisms, the emergence and development of the ICT4SUD discourse, which is, simultaneously, influenced by the power/knowledge relations established in European society that bounds or expands its success. Finally, as to ideological reproduction, the ICT4SUD discourse reconstructs cultural claims, conveys ideological messages, and reproduces and legitimizes power structures.