News & Comment

Mila Burns, an Associate Professor of Latin American Studies and History at the City University of New York, illustrates the effects that Lisbon has over time itself.

Urbanization processes reshape space — and the human and non-human relationships that play out in and through space — over time. The intensification of urbanization poses a range of threats to the natural environment and correspondingly to the socioeconomic welfare of urban residents. The articles in this issue highlight how, from the soil upon which cities are built to the trees, water and air that give life to urban spaces, inequality has become embedded as a structuring feature of urban natural environments.

Violence against women is a widespread and growing issue in cities worldwide, but it is rarely considered in urban planning. To meet this challenge, Elizabeth L. Sweet encourages renewed considerations of time, space and relationships in urban scholarship and planning.

Co-opting our cities for short-term ends can leave them brutalized and breathless. Theatre practitioner and performance-studies scholar Gargi Bharadwaj considers New Delhi’s key events from 2023 and the redemptive power of live performance to revive us.

A ‘Sister Cities for the Anthropocene’ network could address the challenges experienced by urban communities in the wake of Anthropocene-driven change.

The idea that ‘context matters’ has become a cliché in many scenarios, but it doesn’t make it less true in urban settings: the neighborhood you live in, the way you move through the city, the places you visit, all of these change the way we experience urban life. But context is not only about spaces; it also means people and how we interact with each other. A long commute could be just as lonely whether you are in an empty bus or surrounded by others in rush hour with everyone wearing earphones. This month’s issue puts the spotlight on both parts of the urban experience to paint a more complex picture.

The bubbling up of diverse ethical values poses profound questions for urbanists worldwide, writes Justin Beaumont.

In this interview, Peter D. Blackmer, Assistant Professor of Africology and African American Studies at the Eastern Michigan University, spoke to us from Detroit to discuss the value of grassroots perspectives in urban research and oral history as a method.

Toyia Watts, President of Charlevoix Village Association in Detroit, speaks as a long-term resident of a neighbourhood targeted for gentrification.

Over millennia, cities have evolved into new versions of themselves. This issue of Nature Cities explores pressing urban alterations in this moment of history, including conflicts wrought by gentrification and the unfolding iterations of climate change.

We share our cities with more than just other people. Author and lawyer Min Lim reflects on how one urban ark has changed and might change to support her feathered travelers.

An unfolding global polycrisis has accentuated the critique of contemporary urbanism, which has failed to be inclusive and developmental, especially in the Global South. A shift in trajectory will require a shift in our imaginaries, inclusionary processes and institutions.

Urban areas concentrate people from many different backgrounds, but these people are not distributed uniformly or randomly in space. This is the key issue that segregation studies want to raise, and it is one that has long had social and policy implications. In many cities, similar groups of people live close to each other, with few opportunities to share residential, work or leisure spaces with other groups — this in turn results in fragmentation and isolation. These unequal distributions are often a consequence of historically constructed social hierarchies, such as race and class systems, that allow certain groups to enjoy urban goods while others suffer the consequences of urban ills.

George Town, the historic capital of Malaysia’s Penang state, is a renowned UNESCO World Heritage Site. That status, argues Khoo, is as much about ‘who’ as it is about ‘what’.

From design-for-disassembly to urban mining, industrial ecology holds key insights for transitioning towards sustainable cities. Yet, its insights into the reuse of building materials remain largely underutilized in urban design and architectural practice.