The Complexity of the City, Sustainable Cities Possible or an Impossible:A Critical Review

Half of the earth population is living in dense urban areas, today, while only a third of the population lived in cities in the 1950’s. This phenomenon clearly states that there is an increase in the demand for city lifestyle, leading to the emergence of the sustainable city concept. The literature revealed a variety of definitions and descriptions for sustainability and sustainable cities in their complex shapes and sizes with a wide range of strategies, frameworks, phrases, concepts, indexes and indicators. This controversy created a huge diversity of opinion and confusion to the literal performance of the term “Sustainability” and “sustainability indicators” and to accentuate the vagueness of indicators two principles - acclaimed as the most successful philosophies - for how a sustainable city should perform are compared. They are: 1) The commission of Architecture and the Built Environment (CABE) for sustainable cities and 2) The ten principles of Melbourne. The Ultimate aim of this paper is to identify the key limitations of existing principles and discuss the philosophy of control that sustainability imposed on cities and how it should be relinquished to the citizens. It presents a critical review of different related concepts including sustainable, eco, liveable and intelligent cities. The results indicate that the concept of sustainability is not an erroneous idea but stakeholders need to evolve the concept in itself. The Sustainability concept is vulnerable and due to its vagueness it lead to the emergence of the Integral City which gave a more refined definition for the city future.