Contemporary Meanings of the "Sustainable City': A Comparative Review of the French- and English-Language Literature

This paper analyses the repertoire of the sustainable city' by conducting a comparative review of the French- and English-language literature. Some use this language for its practical impact regarding urban policies; others criticize it as a tool for legitimizing growth-oriented policies. The article aims at overcoming this duality. Statistical and lexical analyses evidence four main variants of sustainable city' discourses, subject to debate: green city', city of short distances', just city' and participatory city'. They yield four main findings: first, there is no single model of the sustainable city'; second, the different approaches are not mutually exclusive, be it conceptually, institutionally, practically or geographically; third, the sustainable city' appears as a genuinely political repertoire - a wide range of actors and institutions act as filters, promoters or detractors; fourth, these situated uses are not fixed but constantly changing, in terms of both contents and procedures. Copyright (c) 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment