The current patterns of household consumption are environmentally unsustainable, especially in wealthy societies such as the Nordic countries. Globally, housing and energy use at home, travel, food, and the consumption of other goods and services contribute to roughly 60-70% of greenhouse gas emissions. Online footprint calculators have been introduced as a soft policy measure in order to raise public awareness of the carbon footprint of ordinary living. We examined ten calculation tools and interviewed six calculator hosts to study calculator features and hosts' expectations and experiences on engaging people to use calculators and to steer consumption. Our findings show that knowledge intensive calculators are designed to support a rational reflection of lifestyle and activities from an environmental perspective. Tips and pledges are presented in calculators to support taking action. However, engaging people to use calculators, especially more than once, is often considered to be challenging. We further discuss our findings with a framework based on practice theories and point out how features of calculators hold potential for further development, as well as have limitations. The limitations should be taken seriously in considering the role of calculators in policy-mixes to steer household consumption. We also propose that future studies on calculators would benefit from practice approaches in order to further explore patterns of calculator (non)use and how calculator use is (dis)connected from the practices they aim to change, and to avoid over emphasising the role of knowledge in reconfiguring practices.

Urban sustainability has been used to cover multiple aspects of urban development. Terms related to sustainability have been generously used to advance ubiquitous and hard-to-measure targets not least in response to global and national sustainable development (SD) targets. However, ad-hoc and governed urbanization processes differ. In addition to different development pathways, local differences in interpretation of sustainability exist. This renders a global urban sustainability discourse disconnected from local practice. In this paper we focus on the Nordic cities, combining what is known about the similarities of the cities and societies, their recent development and highlights. Comparing with the global sustainability discourse spearheaded by the UN development goals (SDGs) we analyze the potential links in Nordic urban development to the global aims, as well as the local action taken via ex-ante review and assessment. With increasing demands for transformative change in urban planning and other institutions due to environmental, social and economic challenges, we demonstrate where strengthening the urban sustainability agenda is particularly needed. Findings show surprisingly little focus on socially just and cross-thematic development pre-SDGs, while it is expected that the dominant technocratic focus will give way to these other aspects necessary to address sustainability under the current SDG framework.