This article examines the international travels of ideas about sustainable urban planning and design through a focus on private sector architecture, planning and engineering consultants. These consultants, who we refer to as the global intelligence corps (GIC), package up their expertise in urban sustainability as a marketable commodity, and apply it on projects around the world. In doing so, the global intelligence corps shape norms about what constitutes ‘good’ sustainable urban planning, and contribute to the development of an internationalised travelling model of sustainable urbanism. This article draws on a broad study of the industry (GIC) in sustainable urban planning and design, and two in-depth case studies of Swedish global intelligence corps firms working on Chinese Eco-city projects. Analysis of this material illustrates how the global intelligence corps’s work shapes a traveling model of sustainable urbanism, and how this in turn creates and reinforces particular norms in urban planning practice.

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This paper explores the effects and underlying intentions of Swedish practices of exporting sustainable development models to Chinese ecocities. Under the 'bestpractice' banner, international architectural firms are often invited to masterplan ecocity developments. The 'sustainable city' has thus become an export commodity, supported by the Swedish government and seen as especially suited to the Chinese ecocity market. Two cases are examined, where Swedish architecture firms have been commissioned to masterplan Chinese ecocities: the Caofedian and Wuxi Eco-cities. In particular, I examine three kinds of 'effects': first, the planning discourse manifested in the planning documents; second, how these plans materialize on the ground; and, third, the effects of this exported planning practice on Swedish policy and practice at home. This paper advances our understanding of how transnational urban sustainability practices are constructed and circulated. It further adds to the field of planning mobilities by examining not only the discourse and diffusion of transnational master planning but also how the 'export' circulates and returns. I argue that the two intentional logics of exporting the Swedish 'sustainable city'-to shape a better world and to export clean-tech products-could both be seen as having failed in these two cases. Instead, the naming and branding of the ecocities seem to boost a certain repetitive problematic idea and practice of sustainable urban development. I argue that the Swedish exported practice strengthens and legitimizes a circulating narrative establishing a sustainable urban planning practice fostering a paradoxically generic image of upper-middle-class consumers as ecocity inhabitants in China as well as in Sweden.

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This paper explores how local authorities can develop infrastructure for collaborative consumption, i.e. sharing amongst citizens of tools, spaces and practical skills. The City of Malmö, Sweden, is used as a case study to illustrate the work with such "sharing infrastructure". Existing planning research and planning practice for sustainability generally focus on facilitating citizens to live in a more eco-friendly way in terms of housing, modes of transport, waste flows and use of green space, but do not address citizens' consumption of other material goods. This paper points to a potential role for local public planning in relation to collaborative consumption through creating sharing infrastructure, i.e. providing access to shared tools and spaces for making and repairing, thus enabling citizens to act in the city not only as consumers, but also as makers and sharers.