Much has been written about ‘sustainability’ and, as a result the discourse is replete with uncertainties, contradictions and confusion. This paper focuses on a single sustainability problem and the change in planning required to confront it.

The first section below is devoted to the problem of climate change, or more correctly ‘global warming’. Much will be familiar to planners, yet it seems necessary to reiterate it if only to drive home the familiar message of the environmental Cassandras that failure to change will result in a global holocaust of unimaginable horror.

The technology for avoiding that waste is simple and well understood. The difficult question is how to move not cities but the institutions that create them from a path that continuously reproduces waste to one in which both waste is averted and better living conditions are produced. This is a question that goes to the heart of planning. This question is addressed in the second section.