Reviews & Analysis

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.

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.

Seeking a simple, consistent and rigorous definition of ‘urbanness’ that can be applied across spatial and temporal scales, Fox and Wolf argue for a geo-demographic measure based on population concentration and the distance required to reach a population threshold, rather than a definition relying on fixed boundaries or level of development.

Rusca et al. propose the plural climate storylines framework to build on the narrative element of physical climate storylines with methods that emphasize power asymmetries, decoloniality, co-production and desired futures. The goal of pluralizing climate storylines is to promote just, equitable development interventions.

Cities worldwide are grappling with the rise of remote work, especially after the COVID-19 pandemic. This Perspective argues that research on remote work is siloed and suggests a coherent approach for interdisciplinary engagement to improve evidence-based policy.

How to delineate a city becomes more challenging the more we learn. This Perspective argues for using cell-phone data as a standard because they are information rich and geographically expansive and because they illuminate both people’s concentrations in given areas and flows among them.