Reviews & Analysis

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.

Citizen scientists counted and classified light sources while walking through various urban environments, with the goal of understanding the types of light sources that illuminate our nights. Comparison of this survey with nighttime satellite imagery enables estimating the total number of light sources at the level of an entire city or country.

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.

A comprehensive radar satellite analysis of 28 major cities in the USA reveals that more than 20% of the land area in each city is sinking, which affects 34 million residents. Driven by natural processes and groundwater extraction, these sinking areas threaten approximately 29,000 buildings and exacerbate flood risks.

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.

The color of cities is a striking feature of their culture, heritage and built environment. By examining the chromatic reconstruction of 3,103 heritage buildings over 40 years in Singapore, we note dynamic changes in local color in the city and suggest that color should be preserved as part of the sociocultural ecology.

A study by Salazar-Miranda and Talen investigates the adoption and effect of form-based codes in the promotion of sustainable urban forms. Using natural language processing, it analyzes zoning documents from over 2,000 US census-designated places.

We used natural language processing to analyze thousands of zoning documents and investigate the effect of form-based codes (a type of zoning reform) on urban sustainability. Form-based codes are widespread and contribute to improved walkability, shorter commutes and a higher share of multifamily housing.

Forests help to sustain cities and all who live in them. This Review considers barriers to sustaining resilient forests and suggests paths for overcoming 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.

Using five infrastructure sectors (transportation, energy, health, utilities and governance), this Review pays attention to the mechanisms through which smart dimensions of cities operate in terms of how information flows from the device to the decision.

With the rapid growth of urban natural-gas distribution systems comes the frequent occurrence of pipeline leaks. A strategy that combines vehicle-mounted tools and sniffer canines for leak detection leverages both technological and biological advantages: its effectiveness has been demonstrated in field tests on 4,000 km of pipelines across 20 Chinese cities.

This Review explains the advances in complexity science for smart cities, showing how the logic of this field can be applied to increasingly complex features of cities.

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.

In extensive food-delivery order records across 100 Chinese cities, a marked surge in urban residents’ reliance on food-delivery services can be seen during hot days, which suggests a newly emerging heat adaptation strategy. Further quantification of mitigated heat exposure reveals unequal benefits experienced by different populations.

Proposing pathways to what they call urban heat justice, Anguelovski et al. argue that heat adaptation strategies must account for historic drivers of environmental injustice, including historically exclusionary urban planning practices, particularly around housing, and new manifestations of environmental injustice such as heat gentrification.

A mixed-methods study of crime in the English city of Nottingham shows that the presence of a governance-type organized criminal group helped to reduce ordinary crime in the immediate area.

Drawing on unique survey and administrative data from more than 800 organizations in 5 cities worldwide, this study shows how civil society organizations adapt their integrative practices to the neighborhoods in which they are located. Organizations in low-income neighborhoods emphasize social connections, whereas those in affluent, migrant-rich neighborhoods prioritize access to institutions.