Critical assay about urban sustainability. Proposal and conceptual boundaries

Abstract

This article emerges from the goal of questioning the meaning of urban sustainability while revealing the conceptual boundaries among three related concepts: development, growth, and the sustainable. These three concepts interplay to make up the urban, which is useful for the conceptual phrasing of the city’s sustained urban development. Thus, and resorting to epistemology, philosophical tenets, and a critique to the definition of urban sustainability, the conclusions is the need to differentiate two concepts: sustained urban development –elaborated in this article– and the city’s controlled growth. The first concept is analyzed by breaking it up in two fundamental parts, namely: infrastructure –made up by society and human beings– and a superstructure, which is the city itself.