ORIGINAL PAPER Sustainable Community Development: A Brief Introduction to the Multi-Modal Systems Method Christian Maciel de Britto Published online: 1 September 2011 Ó Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2011 Abstract There is still no agreement on the concept of sustainable development but, what was initially only seen as an equation of economic growth and protection of environment resources, has now began to include several other dimensions, such as the social, cultural, ethical, legal and political. However, this requires a scientific perspective capable of dealing with ethical and normative questions. The Multi-Modal Systems Method intends to tackle the sustainable issue in a total manner, based on a trans-disciplinary approach and on a method that makes possible practical applications in empirical contexts. This article presents an introduction to this method in the context of the sustainable development of communities. Keywords Sustainability Á Systems Á Communities Á Dooyeweerd Á de Raadt Introduction With the passage of time the concept of sustainable development has acquired a substantial semantic load and diverse applications. It has gone through a journey that started with theoretical and scientific deliberation and then passed through political propaganda (Biocidade 2009) ending up as a strategic tool of marketing to obtain financial resources. Initially termed ‘‘eco-development,’’ the concept has been given a theoretical formulation by Ignacy Sachs (Paulista et al. 2008), a French economist now resident in Brazil. In a general manner, sustainable development is understood by many not as a means of changing the present means of production and its structural mechanism that produces unequal distribution, but as a means to attain economic growth with an increase of benefit for humanity while at the same time, preserving the natural resources for future generations (Paulista et al. 2008; Sachs 2004; Oliveira 2006). C. M. de Britto (&) Universidade Federal do Parana ´, Curitiba, Parana ´, Brazil e-mail: chriseana@gmail.com 123 Syst Pract Action Res (2011) 24:533–544 DOI 10.1007/s11213-011-9206-8