Sustainable development as planning notion embodies a strong legitimisatiοn power in the implementation field and potential in policy and research development at the international level. Sustainability criteria and objectives now compose a dominant policy outlook for european cities (and not only). From the overall experience however, some possibilities and points of critique can be deduced. In the case of Greece it would seem that sustainability as a planning notion develops mostly as a rhetoric and has little to do with applied policy and even more does not seem to influence positively the operation of the planning system as whole. The notion seems to be absorbed by and/or sponsor the prevailing, throughout the past decades, trends in spatial development and planning.
