Creating effective solutions for cities must draw on generalizable knowledge, but ideally within the context of local particularities. No two cities are the same, although resonances between cities and regions inform how to learn from one another and how to generate new knowledge for local progress.

This issue features contributions from across sectors to grapple with decarbonization as a pressing priority for cities. Through research, education and policy, scholars, practitioners and decision-makers are grappling with how to prepare cities and urban residents as the climate emergency accelerates.

In policy and planning, especially for global development, there is a pressure to implement best practices and to test models at a large scale for the sake of efficiency. However, this trend has met a serious critique that one-size-fits-all solutions will miss the mark in addressing local challenges. In his World View, Virgüez delves into this tension, pointing out how decarbonization solutions from the Global North cannot effectively be implemented in Global South cities as a carbon copy. Instead, Virgüez proposes engagement strategies to tap into the local knowledge of students and residents that can go beyond the limitations of traditional models. This insight is reiterated in a Review by Shen et al., who summarize broad findings around indoor carbon-capture technologies to promote air quality and reduce the need for ventilation. While these technological advances should be adaptable across cities, local social and political contexts reveal a more complex landscape for implementation that requires harmonizing planning and policy approaches to achieve promised benefits. To echo Virgüez, copy-and-paste will not work in the absence of local understandings.

There is also a bias that small cities do not need the policy infrastructure of large cities. In his World View, Quirion, Chief Scientist of Québec, disputes this sensibility, arguing that no city is too small for science advice. Highlighting the flexibility of smaller cities, Quirion points out the necessity for all cities to respond to the challenges climate change will hold and for cities to network for capacity building and cooperation.

A range of research is necessary to advance urban insights. In a Meeting Report from the 42nd Annual Congress of the Latin American Studies Association, our editor Sebastián Villamizar Santamaría summarizes the breadth of interdisciplinary conversations spanning methods and topics from the region. In particular, structural inequalities are evident in the design of studies from well-funded institutions from the Global North versus publicly funded Latin American institutions, which tend to have a more local focus. At Nature Cities, we want to play a role in equalizing these disparities, building knowledge from local as well as comparative studies in order to feature high quality research and opinion from a diversity of vantages.

Local and regional studies can promote insights that shape a more nuanced global understanding. Cao et al.’s Article finds that neighboring rural land cover can mitigate the effects of urban heat islands in a sample of Chinese cities. In particular, the authors find that natural areas spanning half the city’s diameter, especially more complex and less fragmented landscapes, provide greater cooling effects. In another Article, Testi et al. study mobility patterns in the Bronx, New York, to understand disparities in the effects of air pollution. By analyzing the place of exposure, they find that Hispanic-majority and low-income neighborhoods are the most severely and disproportionately exposed. These findings can inform studies from other localities to understand both patterns of climate risk and potential solutions.

Some of the texture and personality of a city cannot be conveyed solely through numbers. In an I and the City, Rojas relates her deep connection to Puan, at the University of Buenos Aires, and the unique capacity for mass mobilization in that city. Taking to the streets in protest is a time-honored way for residents there to intervene in public debate and to make visible and powerful residents’ collective concerns.

In this issue, we include two Research Highlights that demonstrate the power of qualitative and mixed methods research. The first Research Highlight discusses Li et al.’s study, which found that urban heritage sites contribute to social cohesion in Nara, Japan. This study used a mailed questionnaire to elicit survey responses, which were then analyzed statistically. The second Research Highlight, discussing a paper by Sutherland, et al., is a fully qualitative study, focused on building a theory for counter-cities. This paper challenges the trend of universalizing a dominant understanding of cities, showing how in Durban, South Africa, planning and policy processes moved ‘counter’ to traditional expectations. Highlighting these works, we want to signal Nature Cities’ interest in studying all types, sizes and geographies of cities, expanding the range of conceptual tools and methods for achieving urban insight.

While large-scale quantitative studies are imperative to understand the challenges cities face, they are not enough to create workable solutions for all kinds of cities. Local specificities can be quantified to an extent. At the same time, this must be matched with other ways of knowing to achieve effective implementation that will provide benefits not just overall for a city, but also for their different neighborhoods, populations, and especially for their most vulnerable residents. Some problems cannot be untangled without an in-depth qualitative understanding of urban processes. For this reason, Nature Cities encourages the submission of case studies, ethnographies and mixed method research to build new layers of local knowledge.