ABSTRACT
There is currently little disagreement within contemporary debates on sustainable development on the fact that we now live in an urban world. This is epitomized by the now highly popular claim that ‘the sustainability battle will be lost or won in cities’, an argument that in turn has inspired over the last two decades multiple planning pathways to tame ‘unsustainable cities’. However, whether this just signifies a world demographic shift, the expansion of capitalist urbanization, a fundamental socio-political change or the dominance of cities in shaping nature at planetary scale raises different interpretations of emerging realities and the practices and regimes that make the urban world.
