The aim of this article is to see how awareness of sustainable development and environmental justice can be increased and operationalized in planning through the use of scenarios. On scrutinizing four long‐term urban development strategies for Stockholm, we found that they all intend to depict a sustainable urban development, but the resultant images are very different. This article underlines the importance of combining environmental justice with an understanding of environmental threats and risks. We see that the carrying capacity of nature is limited, but we also see the need to share resources justly and make sure that environmental degradation does not systematically strike certain groups only. The conceptual elements are applied to four scenarios for a future Stockholm, zooming in to some extent on a suburban shopping node just outside the city. The point of focusing on it is that such shopping areas are sometimes seen as symbols of non‐sustainable city development, but, since they are already in place, their function in the future city needs to be discussed.