Meehan and colleagues study access to running water in large US cities since 1970, finding that the 2008 financial crisis worsened household ‘plumbing poverty’ in many cities. This disproportionately impacted households of color and generally squeezed lower-income households into more precarious living situations.

Plants are vital to healthy cities, yet urban environments filter the plant traits we find. This study assesses the relative dominance of different seed dispersal modes among plants that establish in cities without human intent, finding that many disperse their own seeds and that seed dispersal by water is less common.

This study characterized the intercity domestic migration flows in four countries, and found that in the USA, the UK and Canada, flows from big cities serve as shocks in smaller nearby cities, but not in France.

Yazar and coauthors investigate the incorporation of procedural justice—fair and inclusive decision-making processes—among the climate-ambitious cities in the C40 network. They find that less than half of C40 cities emphasize procedural justice in climate planning, thereby limiting their ability to meaningfully address systemic inequality.

Using two socioeconomically different neighborhoods in Seattle, this study shows that place-based peer-to-peer resource sharing can substantially improve community resilience in both types of neighborhoods. Strong ties were about 1.5–3 times as effective as weak ties, and the neighborhood with lower socioeconomic status (SES) required more ties to achieve an optimal sharing rate than the neighborhood with higher SES.

This study analyzes the impact of 1,436 air-quality-monitoring stations in Chinese cities. It found that these stations led to an 8.03% reduction in PM_2.5 concentrations in urban areas. Within these areas, they resulted in 0.57% more reduction in PM_2.5 concentrations in technically accessible areas compared to non-accessible areas, which also experienced an increase in housing prices and a decrease in air-quality-induced mortality.

As urbanization affects planet Earth and humanity with ever more poignant and confounding implications, Nature Cities celebrates the end of our first year, and we recommit to integrating knowledge across disciplines, sectors and contexts.

Urban LGBTQI+ inclusive houses in Bogotá offer a transformative model of care and community building for queer migrants, writes Tyler Valiquette.

Humans have a natural bond with water, which is reflected in the universal principle of ‘living and prospering by water’. Landscape architect and educator Xi Lu shares the story of the Xiangxi River in the water city of Suzhou and considers human–water interactions over time.

The popular concept of using technology to improve urban life gained traction over a decade ago. But researchers and practitioners say that the focus has shifted from big cities to small cities that are transforming organizational structures and implementing new technologies.