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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]

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]

The world has become urban; cities increasingly shape our worldviews, relation to other species, and the large-scale, long-term decisions we make. Cities are nature, but they need to align better with other ecosystems to avoid accelerating climate change and loss of biodiversity. We need a science to guide urban development across the diverse realities of global cities. This need can be met, in part, by shifts in urban ecology and its linkages to related sciences. This perspective is a "synthesis of syntheses", consolidating ideas from the other articles in the Special Section. It re-examines the role of urban ecology, and explores its integration with other disciplines that study cities. We conclude by summarizing the next steps in the ongoing shift in urban ecology, which is fast becoming an integral part of urban studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The narrative of urban sustainability transformations epitomises the hope that urban governance can create the conditions to plan and govern cities in a way that they contribute to local and global sustainability and resilience. So far, urban governance is not delivering: novel governance approaches are emerging in cities worldwide, yet are unable to transform conventional policymaking and planning to allow for innovative, co-beneficial and long-term solutions and actions to emerge and institutionalise. We present a capacities framework for urban transformations governance, starting from the need to fulfil distinct output functions ('what needs to happen') for mobilising and influencing urban transformation dynamics. The framework helps to diagnose and inform urban governance for responding to disturbances (stewarding capacity), phasing-out drivers of path-dependency (unlocking capacity), creating and embedding novelties (transformative capacity) and coordinating multi-actor processes (orchestrating capacity). Our case study of climate governance in New York City exemplifies the framework's applicability and explanatory power to identify conditions and activities facilitating transformation (governance), and to reveal gaps and barriers of these vis-à-vis the existing governance regime. Our framework thereby functions as a tool to explore what new forms of urban transformation governance are emerging, how effective these are, and how to strengthen capacities. • Existing urban governance is unable to address persistent problems. • Effective governance support of transformation lies in collective capacities. • We develop a framework of four capacities for urban transformation governance (UTG). • We use the framework to explain the development of UTG capacities in New York City. • The framework enables explaining, evaluating and supporting UTG. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract Climate change actions in cities worldwide are driving deep changes in urban governance. We ask whether new capacities for transformative climate governance are emerging in two cities that have experimented with urban climate governance: Rotterdam, the Netherlands, and New York City (NYC), United States. Transformative climate governance creates the conditions for developing integrated and innovative climate mitigation and adaptation policies and interventions that respond to and shape urban transformation dynamics and contribute to sustainability and resilience. The comparison of capacities for transformative climate governance in Rotterdam and NYC offers insights into the emerging features of urban climate governance vis-à-vis existing urban governance regimes: how urban climate governance is driven and delivered, what new governance conditions emerge, and whether these conditions enable transformative climate governance. In both cities, an integrated, experimental and inclusive approach to climate governance is emerging, which crosses multiple policy sectors and domains (e.g. transport, energy, health, justice), involves a variety of actors and facilitates innovative solutions. Envisioning, long-term goal and knowledge integration, experimentation and tapping into coalitions for change help to provide the basis (including guiding principles, urgency, actor networks, innovative solutions) for transformative climate governance. However, these transformative approaches tend to be still subordinate to business-as-usual interests and policy and planning approaches, which favour isolated, incremental and short-term responses. The challenge for strengthening transformative climate governance will be to develop rigorous institutional and organisational conditions that decisively stipulate a prioritisation of climate change across scales and sectors, provide action mandates and enable wider coordination, collaboration and learning. Highlights • Climate governance activities in cities drive deep changes in urban governance. • Transformative climate governance (TCG) supports desirable urban transformations. • Capacities for TCG manifest in new institutional, knowledge and network conditions. • Visioning, goal and knowledge integration and experimentation create TCG capacities. • Top-down institutional and organisational conditions need to be strengthened for TCG. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on urban ecosystems rapidly expanded in the 1990s and is now a central topic in ecosystem science. In this paper, we argue that there are two critical challenges for ecosystem science that are rooted in urban ecosystems: (1) predicting or explaining the assembly and function of novel communities and ecosystems under altered environmental conditions and (2) refining understanding of humans as components of ecosystems in the context of integrated social-ecological systems. We assert that these challenges are also linchpins in the further development of sustainability science and argue that there is a strong need for a new initiative in urban systems science to address these challenges and catalyze the next wave of fundamental advances in ecosystem science, and more broadly in interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]