ABSTRACT
The sustainability as a concept and sustainable development as a normative goal have their own interwoven histories as elaborated elsewhere in this handbook and at great length, for example, by Ulrich Grober and Jeremy Caradonna. Moreover, Klaus Toepfer recognized that growth—of economies, of populations, of urban areas—has had a mixed but largely negative impact on many of the world's city-dwellers, especially in the Global South. Since 2000, a wide range of individuals and organizations—from world leaders and mayors of so-called global cities, to urban planners, climate scientists, and even environmentalists—have made very similar assertions. John Friedmann and Goetz Wolff's analysis of world city formation advanced this line of thinking by emphasizing how a global network of cities had formed to support "the emerging world system of production and markets" in the interest of "the great capitalist undertaking to organize the world for the efficient extraction of surplus.
