Addressing climate change through green building in Luxembourg and Freiburg: achieving urban sustainability or business as usual?

Grounded into critical literature on the green economy and ecological modernisation (e.g. Gibbs and Krueger 2007; Bina 2013; Whitehead 2013; Bailey and Caprotti 2014) the proposed contribution looks at climate policies focusing on green building in two city regions: Luxembourg (LU) and Freiburg (DE).
Although they have engaged differently and at different points in time with the topic, both identify the built environment as key in reaching urban sustainability. Through the discursive analysis of policy and media documents, further contextualised with interviews of key local actors, I will inquire how far these green building policies, following their claim to be innovative and transformative, can indeed be considered to be so, further from their technological carbon-controlling dimension.
I will focus specifically on the visions, rationales and justifications mobilised to show that, despite their apparently different conceptions, green building policies in both places are framed along a "sustainability (policy) fix" (While et al. 2004; Lombardi et al. 2011) prodded by the dominant socioeconomic consensus. In Luxembourg, green building is strongly articulated as a mean to pursuit the existing model of social affluence, while in Freiburg the citizen-led achievements of the 90's have been recuperated by the city administration to competitively position itself as a leader in green wealth and quality of living (Cidell 2012; Mössner 2016).
I will conclude by illustrating how this materialises into concrete building projects with very similar (technological) focuses towards carbon controlling.