Perspectives in 2025

Low-income urban communities are facing infrastructural inequities. This Perspective advocates for an agenda that aims at reorienting infrastructure research by bridging methodological divides, integrating fragmented datasets and actors, and centering engagement with affected communities.

Nature-based solutions have long been touted as important for addressing urban challenges, such as from climate change. This Perspective argues for using synthetic biology to help to meet such challenges and make our cities more sustainable.

Informal workers contribute meaningfully to cities worldwide. This Perspective argues that current regulatory approaches in San Francisco and New York City constrain informal work and workers, considering cases from the Global South in service of a more inclusive approach.

Cities are renowned for catalyzing human interactions, but their effects on urban species are less clear. This Perspective argues for such a focus, and proposes a framework for studying interactions between urban species.

Cities are home to many species, so managing urban ecosystems accordingly is important. This Perspective argues for better integration of widely used biodiversity modeling frameworks and tools into urban ecology and the management of urban landscapes.

Focusing on the urban growth–environment nexus, this Perspective analyzes economic, population, spatial and environmental dimensions through green growth, degrowth and post-growth lenses, revealing mixed decoupling evidence.

Engineering of waterproofing for buildings needs innovative low-carbon solutions to promote urban safety and sustainability in the face of climate change. This Perspective introduces a sustainability-driven strategy, explores future directions and offers low-carbon recommendations to advance the field.

Urbanites benefit from greenspace, but the relative benefits for disadvantaged communities are mixed. This Perspective argues that research on the intersection of heath and greenspace needs to critically consider the existing work and provide more evidence of this relationship.

Artificial intelligence, especially large language models, can help urban planning to tackle key challenges. This Perspective explores potential applications and challenges for planners and cities.

Cities can be organized and viewed many ways, as by neighborhoods, streets and so on. This Perspective argues for integrating multiple scales into urban science through a pointillistic approach.

Urban climate action is essential generally and is in the spotlight given the upcoming IPCC focus. The authors propose five gaps in urban climate change research and four paths for tackling them.

Many households in Global South informal settlements do not have access to clean cooking fuel. With the increasing availability of plastics, there is a growing use of this material as cooking fuel, which has health consequences.

This Perspective looks at the dynamic field of urban social and environmental complexity, proposing the RAFT (reversibility, adaptability, flexibility and tailoring) framework to tackle the socio-environmental challenges in urban contexts.