Urban planning is recognized as an interaction between the state and society, which aims to articulate public policies in the territory, facilitating their administration in favor of greater development and well-being of society. However, this interaction becomes complex because consumption demands increase, and the carrying capacity of the urban ecosystem to supply them is exceeded, hindering its sustainable functionality. With this overview, it becomes relevant to study urban planning from a sustainable environmental planning perspective, based on four topics: urban planning, sustainability, resilience, and smart cities, which are developed throughout the document by means of a chronological study. A bibliometric study was used through a Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) adjustment to 87 articles, supported by VOSviewer®, which allowed for the construction and visualization of the co-occurrence networks of key words extracted from the selected articles. Likewise, 16 documents more were used for the co-occurrence analysis. The main result is to consider cities with a complex systems approach that works like a gear; the relationship between inter-urban and intra-urban processes is the key factor that allows for an understanding of their synchronization; therefore, deepening of each of these topics is crucial to the ideal of a territorial administration involving time scales and adaptive cycles, allowing for the provision of new tools for concepts such as carrying capacity and the measurement of the ecological footprint.