The unsustainable nature of sustainability. From the environmentalization of planning to sustainable cities

Abstract

During the last two decades, sustainability and environmental issues have become an integral part and an emblematic legitimating factor of urban and regional planning discourses and pratices. The United Nations’ sustainable cities programme, created during the 1990s, is one of the most tangible evidences of such convergence between planning and sustainability. As it has been adopted by more than thirty countries, it is necessary and urgent to perform a critical reading of sustainability and of the nature of the environmentalization of the planning discourse, so as to move towards the construction of a political economy of space and of a territorial planning pratice that aims at social transformation.