Yanarella, Ernest J. and Richard S. Levine. 1992. "Does Sustainable Development Lead to Sustainability?" Futures October: 759-774.

Thesis: The authors review and critically analyze many philosophical conceptualizations of sustainable development. They then offer sustainable cities as an "anchor and catalyst" for the global sustainability discourse.

Summary: Yanarella and Levine review several meanings of sustainable development; specifically, the conceptualizations of Lester Brown, Dennis Pirages, Herman Daly and John Cobb as well as Julian Simon and Herman Kahn. They continue to discuss the work of Amory Lovins, Michael Redclift and the Ehrlichs. The authors condense the above theory into three philosophical-political paradigms: industrial-technological, environmental, and ecological. They note, "for us, then, sustainable development is patterned after the model of ecological sustainability guiding mature ecosystems at the stage of climax. Simultaneously, we recognize that the differences between human beings and other animal species and between natural and social systems pose different problems for human populations while permitting human rationality and socially constructed technology to offer limited means for extending the carrying capacity of the ecosystem of which humans are a part" (p. 764).

There are several points on which the authors base their critique of sustainable development strategy (see p. 764-9):

• The issue of scale: societal or global - Meaningful and concerted political action is all but impossible when sustainable development is strategically targeted at the global scale.
• The means to be employed: technological instruments or idealistic panaceas - the authors are critical of both technocratic designs and "doomsaying ecological futurism" because both miss the depth of impact required of any "truly counter-hegemonic strategy."
• Relationship between global and local activities - the authors are critical of the "think globally, act locally" strategy.

Role of the academic disciplines: multidisciplinary or interdisciplinary - the authors support interdisciplinary environmental education; they argue: "For the specialization of knowledge into discrete disciplines establishes substantive boundaries and narrowly bounded discourses that are protective of each discipline's fragile hole on an aspect of natural or social reality. On the other hand, ecology is truly a subversive science since sustainability in its multidimensionality overflows narrow disciplinary perspectives and parameters" (p. 768).

Sustainable Cities: The authors offer three virtues of sustainable cities (see p. 769-70):

• Shifting the sustainability quotient of sustainable development to the positive side by locating ecological and social sustainability within a place, i.e. the city
• Overcoming the historical divisions and philosophical dualisms installed in the modern epoch by alienating and fragmenting processes of Western capitalism and industrialization
• Revisioning global sustainability within humanly scaled terms

The authors discuss five regulative ideas or operating principles for sustainable cities (see p. 770-1):

• Individual and discrete programmes of sustainable development do not necessarily lead to ecological or social sustainability
• A desired activity or process can take its place in a larger system only by finding its balances within that more encompassing system
• The principle of chaotic excess or extravagance - implies that no natural process or social system can avert the action or intervention of those forces of chaos and disorder in the cosmos because they are always already there
• All systems shall first be designed to seek their ecological balances at the smallest appropriate scale, but in any even at no scale larger than the city itself
• All lower imbalances are to be negotiated upwards

In the final section, Yanarella and Levine discuss various implications of alternative cities principles for revisioning sustainable development.

Keywords: sustainable cities, philosophy - political paradigms