SUMMARY
This review is dedicated to the conceptual connection between system resilience and sustainable development. Setting an inclusive frame and beginning with stating the nature of complexity of the sustainability challenge and the resulting uncertainty of planning and management within the socioeconomic domains, the article describes the demand profile for a system approach and the importance of a dissociation of the efficiency paradigm towards a resilience guidance of sustainable development. A focus is on the urban and industrial sphere of global and regional un-sustainability as well as on their functional interconnectedness. Elements of a rooting of a sustainable development considering the urban-industrial nexus are given and the advancement of Social-Ecological Systems (SES) towards Social-Ecological-Technological Systems (SETS) as guiding resilience based framework is proposed.