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Urban sustainability has become an increasingly compelling issue for a human species that is now predominantly urban. Several contemporary influences are asserting the importance of urban action to achieve sustainability and improve species well-being generally: the new urban literature referenced as “urbanology”; powerful new urban coalitions like the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group; and key international organizations, including the OECD, World Bank, and to a lesser extent UN-Habitat. From a critical social science perspective, it is apparent that, while avowing sustainability, these new urban assertions are freighted with, if not completely determined by, the assumptions and norms of neoliberalism, which progressive thought holds destructive to urban progress and well-being. We argue that these new and influential urban schemes and visions fail to comprehensively engage with the imperatives of critical social science, including debates about social equity, a failing human ecology and urban citizenship. The prospect of rapid continuing planetary urbanization, most of it irrevocably removed from the natural environment, suggests a need to rethink conventional approaches, institutional systems and the level of resources dedicated to human development in such crowded, dynamic spaces. Critical social science insists that these paradoxes and challenges are not merely systemic or technical but social in origin and solution. Moreover, we argue that the political questions that define socio-ecological trajectories require serious consideration. The human urban challenge raises the political ecology of change at the species level. Realization of sustainability requires a deep transformation of the structures underlying what is currently termed human progress. It is important therefore to critically appraise and challenge the new urban assertions that threaten to commit us to the disastrously failing path of neoliberalism.

The paper applies an urban political ecology approach to interrogating the use of sustainability constructs by key international governance agencies. We draw on political economy of urban sustainability to identify central themes in the reports to reveal limitations and contradictions in the deployment of the environmental sustainability construct. We argue that the Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development and the World Bank offer little towards the development of a new vision for future cities, only affirmation of neoliberal urbanism. Promisingly, some of ‘key trends’ identified by UN-Habitat will enhance the democratic content of socio-environmental construction. This will achieve a more equitable distribution of social power and inclusive mode of environmental production. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

This article considers the rapid evolution and increased prominence of the C40 Cities Climate Change Leadership Group and its commitment to the development of a new style of thinking, and possibly a new urban construct. This new construct is not yet understood, perhaps due to the fact that it is an inchoate ideal being forged through the work of the network for the future of our cities. Such an assessment is well situated within the political economy of urban sustainability, with its ability to set up an interrogative frame to identify the progressive and regressive possibilities that the C40 signals. This article argues that the C40 cities propose nothing new in their ideas, providing a reinforcement of neoliberal urbanism. We need to deviate from technocratic and “econocratic” approaches toward pathways that emphasize the democratic content of socioenvironmental development. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

The Industrial Revolution, including the ascendance of computer technology, has remade essential elements of human culture and relocated human life. In 1800, when James Watt's patent for his steam engine was only 25 years old, only 3% of the human population lived in urban areas. By the end of World War II this had risen to 30%. At the end of the first decade of the 21st century, for the first time as many humans were living in urban areas as in rural communities. Refereed/Peer-reviewed