Introduction

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) have made explicit and formal a growing trend and focus of the international community, academic scholarship and practitioners on the ground towards urban sustainability. ‘Urban sustainable development’ has been recognised as a complex issue with a variety of components, including: urban biodiversity and ecology; urban fresh water and food security; urban clean energy; urban climate change adaptation and resilience; and green infrastructure. Sustainable cities must be renewable, green, clean, smart and ecologically friendly, but also livable and enjoyable, esthetically and architecturally nice, socially inclusive, and so on.

Is this a realistic view? Isn't this more of a utopia, similar to what medieval writers used to do, imagining ideal and perfect cities? This idyllic scenario is impossible to achieve in a swiftly changing global system where cities are home to contradictory forces and groups that showcase diverse views on the role and goals of urban spaces, and where conflicts and terrorism may abruptly disrupt the system and its structure at any moment. This statement is even more accurate for developing and emerging countries, where a number of capacity gaps make urban sustainability a chimera on top of everyday problems and tragedies. Given these intrinsic difficulties, this chapter investigates sustainable urban resource governance in developing contexts without any regional focus or concentration on a specific resource. The chapter uses a theoretical and methodological geographical approach (meaning it focuses on spaces and spatial dynamics) to offer policy guidance on the implementation of urban sustainability within the context of the post-2015 global agenda and the SDGs.

To this extent, after this introduction, the second part is devoted to urban sustainability, explaining how the operationalisation of definitions would be difficult. The third section of the chapter gives the required definitions, focusing on the urbanisation and metropolisation processes and explaining how ‘resources’ are defined in this chapter. The fourth part presents theoretical and methodological approaches from resource geography, adapting them to urban environments. The fifth section presents examples and insights of cities in developing contexts to underline what is actually done and the role resources have in these processes. In the conclusion, observations and policy recommendations are proposed. If sustainability cannot be achieved, its framework can be used to foster positive and realistic change, which is exactly what the chapter wishes to explore, while focusing on metropolises and capital cities.