The urban resilience marks the continuing progress. The urban development, seen as the paradigm of the evolutionary resilience, allows the consideration of factors that reduce (or expand) the periods of crises. Crisis, resilience and sustainability when diluted in a theoretical frame, testify the increase of the recurrence and magnitude of these phenomena, which have been imposing setbacks in the communities. Trapped in a web of “automatic” balance (retrievers of past situations or projectors of the current ones, sometimes undesired, for the future generations), isn’t the concept of sustainability insufficient to put to action long-lasting trajectories of urban development? Here lies the core of the reflection I hereby propose. Resulting from the synthesis of similar methods, the Model for the Evaluation of Resilience and Sustainability in Urban Systems (MARSSU), measures the intensity of the strangulation to the development potential of the country. The crisis (post-2008), besides penalizing the most vulnerable regions, has eroded the ability to sustain development in the first crowns of the metropolitan areas, in Algarve’s urban strip, in some of the inter-metropolitan regional urban systems /axes and in the secondary centres of the regional systems of the interior. The result is the considerable expansion of the vulnerable areas in the country. This meaning: the development potential of the country has deteriorated and what is left of it has crawled back to the “center of the central areas”. The evaluation of the crisis’ impacts in the West urban system (taking into account the 387 families interviewed, reproducing information related to the life of 1028 individuals) allowed to conclude that, for example, in Peniche, it’s the constraints on the access to income and houses which are increasing the vulnerability and that in Caldas da Rainha, the contraction of income and consumption, put this urban center alongside the previous one. Both suffer more the impacts of the crisis, than the country and urban system in which they are integrated. The results expose deeply installed barriers to the development of these communities.