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Cities and urbanized regions are complex, dynamic, and highly integrated systems linking social, ecological, and technical infrastructure domains in ways that create deep challenges for good governance, policymaking, and planning. The combination of impacts from climate change in cities, air pollution, rapid population growth, multiple sources of development pressure and overall urban system complexity make it difficult for decision-makers to develop and guide development trajectories along more livable, equitable, and at the same time, more resilient pathways. Advancing urban sustainability and resilience agendas requires expanding the scope of inter- and trans-disciplinarity approaches, moving beyond the historically separate social–ecological and socio-technical approaches to jointly study social–ecological–technical infrastructure systems in cities. We take urban complexity as a given and suggest that in both research and practice we need to better capture and understand feedbacks, interdependencies, and non-linearities which create uncertainties and challenge the efficacy of governance practices to achieve normative goals for society. Here, we explore new methods, tools, and approaches to advance our understanding of urban system complexity through a series of journal special issue articles that examine urban structure–function relationships, urban sustainability transitions, green space availability, social–ecological memory, functional traits, and urban land use scenarios. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Defining landscape structure and key relationships between landscape structure and function is challenging in urban areas characterized by density and patchy spatial patterns. In order to trace the spatial and temporal patterns of urban landscape structures, compare patterns across cities, or inform urban design principles, we need to classify the landscape in a way that captures context and landscape heterogeneity, but can be broadly applied across different cities or landscape variations within a city. In this study, we introduce a simple and reproducible approach for classifying the structure of urban landscapes (STURLA) that utilizes heterogeneous, composite classes which represent combinations of built and natural features, and examine the response of a landscape function – surface temperature. This classification approach is unique in that it develops composite (as opposed to homogeneous) classes, which are defined a posteriori, based on compositions of adjacent structural elements that emerge in the urban landscape, using a cellular grid to define units of analysis. We test the separability of classes that emerge from this approach, and find that it is possible to discern classes – comprised of the mix of land and building covers common in urban areas – which have meaningfully distinct temperature signatures. This classification approach may be extended to multiple cities and ecological indicators in order to offer insight into the relationship between urban landscape structure and ecosystem response, in a way that accounts for interactions among different types of urban landscape surfaces. We suggest that this approach can support spatial prioritization of landscape function needs in urban development and design approaches for improving particular types of functioning, such as reductions in urban heat. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]