Sustainable development in general and urban context: A literature review

This report is a literature review about sustainability and sustainable development in general and in an urban context. It focuses on theoretical issues and debates in scientific literature and aims at analyzing the different dimension of sustainability, namely social, ecological and economic sustainability. There are different conflicts between those dimensions of sustainability. Furthermore, there are different theoretical approaches to this topic. This report shows that much of the literature about economic and ecological sustainability does not involve critical and theoretical reflections of the term itself, but focus more on practical field-studies, like measurements of emissions or studies that promote initiates of congestion charging. The critical discussions about the term sustainability and the theoretical aspects are often found in literature concerning social sustainability. However, there are some models and visions about the sustainable city, which give hope to bridging the gap between the three dimensions of sustainability