The aim of this paper is to analyse how the term attractiveness is interpreted in Swedish contemporary urban planning. The focus is to analyse how the term is discursively constructed and by this highlight the conceptions that exist around what makes a city attractive. We want to emphasize the importance of a deeper understanding of how attractiveness is used in urban planning and how the term is a part of the development of our cities. Given the use of attractiveness as a part of visionary goals for Malmö´s and other Swedish cities future development, our intention, therefore, is to enhance the understanding of what the use of attractiveness means in respect of the creation and construction of power relations in time and place. The framework of our analysis is based on the discourse theory approach and used as a way of understanding how urban ideals is discursively constructed. This perspective stresses the production of city and place as a planning process. The meaning of attractive places is historically and contextually dependent and constantly constructed and reconstructed through ideals. We have also used the concept of discourse theory as a tool for analysing our empirical material and to detect which values are combined with the term attractiveness. The study is mostly based on planning-documents and interviews with planners and architects located in the city of Malmö. The paper demonstrates that the term attractiveness is used as a tool for achieving the vision of sustainable development but emphasizes that there is a problem implementing the visionary goal of attractiveness on a practice level. The use of attractiveness within planning practice creates both complications and misunderstandings among planners. The meaning of the concept is presented with both a competitive approach and approaches towards social benefits. Attractiveness tends to contain everything and nothing, which demonstrates the gap between vision and reality in urban planning.