News & Comment

Given the pressures cities faced in 2025, safety and mobility are deeply relevant for 2026. They are also two key themes in this issue of Nature Cities.

Cities remain under pressure, given world events and global change. This issue of Nature Cities highlights ways in which they struggle to find balance, what balance might look like and how cities are wayfinding through this often-surreal terrain.

Urbanization stands as a key megatrend that is shaping Africa’s future, while many cities across the continent continue to struggle with the challenges of informal settlements. At a time when COP30, held in Belém, Brazil, is rallying a global ‘mutirão’ — a collective effort — against climate change, this issue’s Focus spotlights the vital importance of elevating local voices and perspectives to drive a parallel mutirão against the unequal conditions of urban informality across African cities.

Cities are under growing pressure from climate change, biodiversity loss and social inequities. Yet new research highlights how biological, digital and social innovations can help urban systems to adapt and thrive. This issue of Nature Cities showcases advances from artificial intelligence applications to inclusive policy models to self-healing infrastructure, which offer pathways towards more-resilient urban futures.

Cities frequently find themselves on the frontlines of the climate crisis, facing acute environmental risks while also holding the potential to lead transformative changes. In this joint Focus issue between Nature Climate Change and Nature Cities, we explore how cities are evolving into strategic actors by harnessing public education, engineering innovation and governance frameworks to drive climate solutions.

Urban health stands as one of the defining challenges and opportunities of our century. As cities continue to expand and densify, the well-being of their inhabitants is shaped not only by the bricks and mortar of urban form but also by the green and blue spaces that thread through our daily lives, the shifting patterns of infectious disease, and the social and economic structures that govern access and equity. This issue of Nature Cities brings together a set of manuscripts that collectively shed light on these interwoven pathways through which urban environments influence human health.

In the digital era, cities are not just adapting to emerging technologies. They are being fundamentally reshaped and reimagined by them. In this July issue, we explore how innovations — such as digital platforms, surveillance technologies and artificial intelligence — are transforming urban planning, everyday life and governance.

From the dialogues of the World Urban Forum to the pages of Nature Cities, it’s time to embrace the full spectrum of urban life — day and night. In this June issue, we feature urban stories that unfold beneath the moonlit sky, where the rhythms of urban life continue long after dark.

Art echoes through the complex fabric of urban spaces, and leaves a subtle yet transformative imprint. From line and color to scale and the frontier of emerging technology, artistic elements echo through the contents of our May issue, and offer profound insights into the dynamics of the urban realm.

Urbanization — the shift of human populations to cities and the shift of settlements to relatively more populous urban forms — is a defining characteristic of our age. Nature Cities contends with this shift in multiple ways: by featuring associated content, by hosting relevant debates and by, now and then, reflecting on the implications. The contents of our April issue provide a window into some key research themes and what these suggest more broadly.

In a time when cities are catching fire and flooding with increased regularity, longer term and larger scale challenges become evident and highlight the role of both urban knowledge production and urban policy processes.

Cities are known for improving quality of life, yet they also face numerous challenges as they evolve. In this issue of Nature Cities, which includes a Focus on smart cities, we delve into how cities generate opportunities to fulfill fundamental human needs such as food and shelter, all the while encountering obstacles in adopting new services, promoting equity and implementing policies.

The digital revolution has brought with it the promise of smart cities, harnessing big data to address complex urban issues. This Focus explores how the smart city concept can move beyond its technological foundations to encompass socially just and person-centric solutions that improve urban life.

Cities and those who study, manage and advocate for them face a gulf between their ideals and their realities. We encourage you to lean into and explore those spaces.

As urbanization affects planet Earth and humanity with ever more poignant and confounding implications, Nature Cities celebrates the end of our first year, and we recommit to integrating knowledge across disciplines, sectors and contexts.

This year marks the tenth anniversary of World Cities Day, which will take place in Alexandria, Egypt. Declared by the UN General Assembly in 2014, the observance of the 31 October date this year puts the focus on youth and climate actions. And it almost coincides with the twelfth World Urban Forum, hosted in Cairo by UN Habitat in early November, whose focus is on sustainable urbanization.

In this issue of Nature Cities, we highlight the policy relevance of urban research to a variety of domains. These applications also foreground the importance of city policy for mediating connections between human society and the natural environment.

Interdisciplinary dialogue is crucial in framing new perspectives on urban life and in developing analytical frameworks suited to the complex realities of urban contexts.

Urban-focused research has come a long way using big data and urban science to identify general patterns and insights. At Nature Cities, to further obtain insights for research and practice, we also encourage the submission of qualitative research, including but not limited to case studies, ethnographies and theoretically focused work.

The forms and functions of our cities sustain us in many ways. They also deeply impact the air we breathe and the climate we experience, suggesting the value of cities working individually and collectively to help mitigate air pollution and climate change.