Sustainable Development is a priority in today’s political and societal life and has been a major driving force towards new approaches to energy planning. Achieving a sustainable energy future requires recognising and including the social, economic and environmental impacts in the decision making process of an appropriate energy system, especially for urban areas with high concentrations of consumers and rapidly increasing demand for energy. In this paper, we propose the use of a problem structuring method, Soft Systems Methodology (SSM), to structure a Multi-criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) model to facilitate decision making in sustainable urban energy planning. The Value-Focused Thinking (VFT) approach was used to structure a set of fundamental objectives and means objectives identified. Future work directions of this methodological approach currently under development are envisaged.