ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses some common misinterpretations and reflect on the many difficulties that remain in application in urban development. Cities are centers of production and consumption and urban inhabitants reliant on resources and ecosystem services, from food, water and construction materials to waste assimilation, secured from locations around the world. "Sustainable" without acknowledging and accounting for their teleconnections—that is, their long-distance dependence and impact on resources and populations in other regions around the world. Sustainability is commonly misunderstood as being equal to self-sufficiency, but in a globalized world virtually nothing at a local scale is self-sufficient. To become meaningful, urban sustainability therefore has to address appropriate scales, which always would be larger than an individual city. From an urban perspective, general resilience thus only makes sense on a much larger scale than individual cities urban sustainability must include teleconnections and urban dependence and impacts on distal populations and ecosystems.
