| Summary: | This article discusses the role of cities in the Earth System as dissipative systems and presents the significant attributes of urban systems from this perspective. The major facts and problems of cities are briefly recalled emphasizing their complexity, that challenges the standard approaches to urban analysis and planning. In the second section, conceptual aspects of the theory of dissipative structures are briefly introduced, focusing on dynamics and characteristic phenomena. The first two sections feed the third one, examining the reasons that show why a city is a dissipative system. The author thus proceeds to discuss the definitions of the sustainable city, criteria to assess its sustainability, and what is meant by the sustainable development of the city. He also introduces a general systemic framework in which sustainability and sustainable development can be abstracted to its essential elements. It is argued that, because cities are dissipative structures, a city cannot be sustainable if the system is defined as the city itself in isolation from its environment. The increasing challenges to urban sustainability across the world point out to the inadequacy (or at least insufficiency) of the standard approaches to urban sustainability. Those trends, in addition to the emerging global problems, are interpreted in the light of the theory of dissipative structures, suggesting they could indicate the proximity of a bifurcation in the trajectory of the Earth System. An analysis of global scenarios is presented as an illustration of potential planetary trajectories. Finally, the article ends with a set of expected behaviors of the urban systems derived from their condition of dissipative structures, which might contribute to the posing new questions relevant to a research agenda.
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