Volume 1 Issue 9, September 2024

Delivering fair, long-term resilience for tomorrow’s cities means acting now to break cycles of risk accumulation. Inclusive future visioning can help by placing the voices and experiences of those at risk at the start of urban policy, planning and project processes, and integrating this with the best science to reimagine what cities and neighborhoods are for, and could be in the long-term.

Urban archaeology in the humid tropics advances a new and diversified ontology of urban spatial forms, functions and processes that enriches and expands the frame of reference for what cities were in the past, what they are in the present and what they can be in the future.

In the current period of rapid urbanization, nearly 40% of global cities exhibit exacerbated extreme drought due to the warmer and drier urban environment. Furthermore, more than half of global urban regions are projected to experience increasing challenges from extreme drought by 2050.

Our research explores how urban slum dwelling affects clinical markers in patients in their first episode of psychosis in São Paulo, Brazil. Results show slum living correlates with a higher psychosis severity (particularly disorganization and negative symptoms), which highlights the influence of social exclusion on psychosis presentation.

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.

The changing built structure of cities reflects and affects social and environmental forces. Combining remotely sensed and other data, this study finds a global shift in the past three decades, with cities growing more vertically than horizontally.

Relationships among variables such as innovation and crime and the population sizes of cities are a cornerstone of urban science. This study creatively looks over time at how economic activities evolved as a single, iconic city, Paris, grew between 1829 and 1907.

Psychosis severity was analyzed during the first episode of psychosis in São Paulo by place of residence (in slums), age, sex and race. A positive correlation was found between people with high positive and negative syndrome scale scores (a measure of psychosis severity) and high negative and disorganization symptoms.

This study used the case of East Palo Alto in California, USA, to test a model that shows the impacts of presidential disaster declarations under different flood scenarios. It found that issuing a presidential disaster declaration can reduce long-term consumption losses for lower-income households by more than 50% and greatly reduce the disparity in consumption loss between low-income and high-income households.

This study assesses the impact of urbanization on drought, finding that city growth is associated with sharp increases in extreme drought. This is especially the case in tropical regions.

This study performs a systematic review of empirical evidence for climate change adaptation in coastal cities around the world. It found that reported adaptation is mostly slow, narrow, and not transformative as coastal cities predominantly focus their adaptation on past and current challenges, and not future scenarios of risk.