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This perspective emerged from ongoing dialogue among ecologists initiated by a virtual workshop in 2021. A transdisciplinary group of researchers and practitioners conclude that urban ecology as a science can better contribute to positive futures by focusing on relationships, rather than prioritizing urban structures. Insights from other relational disciplines, such as political ecology, governance, urban design, and conservation also contribute. Relationality is especially powerful given the need to rapidly adapt to the changing social and biophysical drivers of global urban systems. These unprecedented dynamics are better understood through a relational lens than traditional structural questions. We use three kinds of coproduction—of the social-ecological world, of science, and of actionable knowledge—to identify key processes of coproduction within urban places. Connectivity is crucial to relational urban ecology. Eight themes emerge from the joint explorations of the paper and point toward social action for improving life and environment in urban futures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this perspective, we present how three initial landmark papers on urban sustainability research contributed to the larger sustainability science scholarship and paved the way for the continued development of urban sustainability research. Based on this, we propose three conceptual innovation pathways to trace the progression of urban sustainability science: First, urban sustainability from a system's perspective, meaning that urban sustainability requires integrative solutions to work in the tripled social-ecological-technological system setting. Second, urban sustainability from a (people and place) relational perspective, meaning urban sustainability is a contested and dynamic social-ecological contract of cities. As a governance mission, urban sustainability requires evidence from research that can inform coordinated action to bridge people, places, meanings, visions and ecosystems. Third, urban sustainability from a transformative science perspective, meaning that for urban sustainability to be achieved and progressed, deep transformations are required in systems, relations, policies and governance approaches. Our proposal for the future of urban sustainability science centres on emphasizing the relevance and policy applicability of systems' thinking, value and place thinking and transitions/transformations thinking as fundamental to how knowledge is co-produced by research science, policy and society and becomes actionable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mapping, modeling, and valuing urban ecosystem services are important for integrating the ecosystem services concept in urban planning and decision-making. However, decision-support tools able to consider multiple ecosystem services in the urban setting using complex and heterogeneous data are still in early development. Here, we use New York City (NYC) as a case study to evaluate and analyze how the value of multiple ecosystem services of urban green infrastructure shifts with shifting governance priorities. We first examined the spatial distribution of five ecosystem services – storm water absorption, carbon storage, air pollution removal, local climate regulation, and recreation – to create the first multiple ecosystem services evaluation of all green infrastructure in NYC. Then, combining an urban ecosystem services landscape approach with spatial multicriteria analysis weighting scenarios, we examine the distribution of these ecosystem services in the city. We contrast the current NYC policy preference – which is focused on heavy investment in stormwater absorption – with a valuation approach that also accounts for other ecosystem services. We find substantial differences in the spatial distribution of priority areas for green infrastructure for the valuation scenarios. Among the scenarios we examined for NYC, we find that a scenario in which only stormwater absorption is prioritized leads to the most unevenly distributed ES values. By contrast, we find least variation in ES values where stormwater absorption, local climate regulation, carbon storage, air pollution removal, and recreational potential are all weighted equally. We suggest that green infrastructure planning strategies should include all landscape components that contribute to the production of ecosystem services and consider how planning priority alternatives generate different ecosystem services values. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]