ABSTRACT
Introduction How do policy makers achieve the objective of building a sustainable urban future? This is the critical question that lies at the core of this book. We are not going to approach this question in a straight forward way. Instead, we want to tackle a number of assumptions that, we argue, hinder thinking about how sustainable cities can be achieved. In particular, we want to enlarge the concept of a sustainable city by building a more complex and multilayered understanding of what the city might become. While we cannot offer policy makers a simple model or pathway towards a sustainable city, we do begin to build a conceptual framework that acknowledges the multiplicity of pathways towards different sustainable futures that often co-exist within a single city. There are three stages to our argument.
