Programmes for sustainability are important normative tools for the development of sustainable building. However, environmental visions must be made much more concrete and they must be conveyed to all parties in the building process so that they all receive the same message on how to build and rebuild housing areas. It is obvious that the local authorities are important actors in this conveying process as they are responsible for the city-planning process. One way to facilitate this process is to produce environmental programs for new housing areas – programs to which the developers have to commit in order to get the permission to launch their new housing projects.

The aim of this paper is to scrutinise two recent environmental programmes in Sweden and to describe and analyse how the programme writers have tried to transform the visions into more concrete goals and how to put demands on the developers. Much attention has been paid to the housing projects and both have been evaluated in research projects. The housing projects are: Bo01 in Malmo and Hammarby Sjostad in Stockholm. This paper will compare the two programs on issues such as energy optimisation, use of environmentally adjusted material and waste management. The programmes have different ways to describe the environmental goals and to put demands on the different actors in the building process. Some issues are hard facts and easy to make precise but other are soft facts that have been very vaguely described in the programs. The paper will also give some conclusions on the how the programs performed in the real situations and why a well written environmental programme will have a positive environmental impact on future housing projects.