Volume 1 Issue 2, February 2024

Bogotá, Colombia’s capital, ranks top amongst the most densely populated cities in the world. Urban planning scholar Juan G. Yunda explains how the city’s history of residential stratification and mobility innovations have balanced exclusivity and integration.

The war in Ukraine is having many indelible impacts, including hearing loss and tinnitus for soldiers and civilians. Urban planning interventions will be essential to accommodate the large scale of post-war hearing disability in Ukrainian cities.

In this interview from late November 2023, James Anderson, Bloomberg Philanthropies’ Government Innovation Lead, discusses the role of philanthropy in addressing urban research and problems.

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.

Waste production is a basic output of human society, and its scale and logistics challenge cities and our Earth system. This study identifies universal patterns by which wastewater, municipal solid waste, and greenhouse gas waste scale across urban systems worldwide.

COVID reshaped our use of urban space, including parks and other green space. This systematic review finds that green space use increased in wealthier regions and in more-exclusive green areas, such as private gardens, among and within countries, yet decreased in less wealthy regions and in spaces open to all.

This study uses online job search queries and job postings in China to understand shifts in the labor market that took place in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. It found that job seekers migrated from large to small cities and from northern to southern regions. Furthermore, the supply of blue-collar jobs decreased substantially, while regional mismatch lessened.

Urban agriculture is intuitively appealing, but its carbon footprint is unclear. This analysis of case studies in the United States and northern Europe finds that food from urban agriculture is much more carbon-intensive but that circularity, such as by recycling of food waste, on long-used city plots can help urban agriculture outperform conventional agriculture.

Most of what I know of street art and graffiti, I learned by walking the streets of Bogotá, Colombia. Like most people, I initially did not notice that my hometown was saturated with murals and pieces, as well as hastily executed stencils, tags and throw-ups. But just like a gestalt image, once you shift your gaze towards the street, you start seeing them, and then there is no turning back. My fascination with these strange letters and images, done mostly by anonymous artists, led me to start thinking through the tensions and contradictions embedded in our public spaces and eventually to writing my master’s thesis on Bogotá’s street art and graffiti culture.