Reviews & Analysis

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  • How did the COVID-19 pandemic affect urban climate actions worldwide? A study now finds that although the climate commitments of most cities persisted, low engagement in green recovery interventions can hamper long-term goals.

    • Daniel Lindvall
    News & Views
  • The relationship between urban mobility and economic development remains controversial. New research analyzes how people in major US cities move and shows the power of infrequent and irregular activities in predicting economic development.

    • Yi Fan
    News & Views
  • This text defines vertical segregation and its importance for urban studies and for cities more generally. It brings some case studies from Athens and other cities in the world to illustrate how this type of segregation appears.

    • Thomas Maloutas
    Review Article
  • Climate change is worsening heat waves across American cities. New research compares the benefits of urban infrastructure adaptation — such as the addition of trees and parks to cities — with those of reducing greenhouse gases on the effectiveness of cooling US cities.

    • Cascade Tuholske
    • Helena Chapman
    News & Views
  • The relationship between cities and infectious disease spread has been heavily debated due to the perceived risk of high urban population densities. A new study examines this relationship in US cities, finding the influence of inequality looms larger than population density per se.

    • Creighton Connolly
    News & Views
  • Based on an analysis of mobile-phone data, students experience greater income-based and racial isolation than adults, and this gap is largest in the biggest metropolitan areas. Students also experience less urban mobility than adults. Yet, differences between students at different levels of income are even greater than those between students and adults.

    Research Briefing
  • Humanity is increasingly urban, but urban living is not new, and past examples showcase striking variation. This Review synthesizes methodological and other advances in archeology to illustrate how compellingly the past can inform current urban science and understanding.

    • Patrick Roberts
    • W. Christopher Carleton
    • Jürgen Renn
    Review Article
  • 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.

    • Lei Dong
    • Fabio Duarte
    • Carlo Ratti
    Perspective