Urban Systems Between the Environment, Human Health and Society: An Overview (2025)

Towards Urbanome the genome of the city to enhance the form and function of future cities

Nature Communications

The health of the city depends on how well all the elements of this system are interconnected and operating in harmony. Here the authors introduced the concept of urbanome which is analogous to the human genome that can be used to characterise the form and functioning of cities. Over the past one hundred years or so a significant shift has occurred in human population distribution worldwide: from 13% of people living in cities in 1900 to 55% 2018, with a further expected increase to 68% by 2050 1,2. This incredibly fast change, taking place within the lifespan of two or three human generations, is in fact a blink in the history of humanity. This is a shift from small rural communities living close to nature, to enormous man-made systems that are largely disconnected from nature. Urbanisation can have both positive and negative impacts 3 , but the complexity of urban systems makes it difficult to determine to what extent our cities are functioning to provide for the many needs of modern communities in high, middle and low-income countries. What framework can encompass the complexity of the system to help us understand it and manage our cities to the greatest extent possible? To do this, we propose to construct the urbanome, a framework to characterise cities and people living in them in a holistic manner. The definition of Urbanome We define the term urbanome as a complete set of data describing the physical, social, operational and structural characteristics of a city, and its impacts, placed on a common platform, where it could be analysed to diagnose problems, identify best solutions to them and test future scenarios, policies and interventions using a holistic systems approach.

Urban Bioinfrastructures: An Introduction

Roadsides, 2023

Cities rely on numerous infrastructures to support life: pipes, cables, antennas, roads and other technologies facilitate the distribution and use of water, energy, information and people. Current theories of urban flows undergirded by infrastructural systems, however, often focus on the perseverance of human life at the expense of other lifeforms. But does this conceptualization of life limit our understanding of the true liveliness of urban infrastructure? The contributions to this themed collection interrogate urban infrastructure as sociobiological configurations that not only sustain life in the city but in turn are constituted, patterned and modified by it.

A Tale of Cells and Cities Our Human Evolutionary Agenda

An evolution biologist and futurist, noting the visual similarities of naturally evolved biological cells and cities with long histories, makes an actual comparison of the two as complex adaptive living entities in evolution and concludes that cities have greater evolutionary potential for leading us into a mature and peacefully cooperative future than either nations or transnational corporations. The RC100 initative thus has enormous potential for leading the way.

Culture, urbanism, and changing human biology.pdf

Anthropologists have long known that human activity driven by culture changes the environment. This is apparent in the archaeological record and through the study of the modern environment. Perhaps the largest change since the paleolithic era is the organization of human populations in cities. New environments can reshape human biology through evolution as shown by the evolution of the hominid lineage. Evolution is not the only process capable of reshaping our biology. Some changes in our human biology are adaptive and evolutionary while others are pathological. What changes in human biology may be wrought by the modern urban environment? One significant new change in the environment is the introduction of pollutants largely through urbanization. Pollutants can affect human biology in myriad ways. Evidence shows that human growth, reproduction, and cognitive functioning can be altered by some pollutants, and altered in different ways depending on the pollutant. Thus, pollutants have significance for human biologists and anthropologists generally. Further, they illustrate the bio-cultural interaction characterizing human change. Humans adapt by changing the environment, a cultural process, and then change biologically to adjust to that new environment. This ongoing, interactive process is a fundamental characteristic of human change over the millennia.

Urban Ecological Restoration and Creating Conditions Conducive to Life through Biomimicry

Cities are essentially ecosystems operating at sub-optimal levels, because of an acute deficit in life-supporting structure. Services once provided by whole, undisturbed ecosystems are no longer available to enable life to not only survive, but thrive. In order to truly repair degraded ecosystems, scientists and city planners must endeavor to restore conditions conducive to life, not simply the missing biodiversity and functions they served. Each relationship in the natural world was built upon a series of interactions before it, and an infinite number before that. The interdependencies found in nature are the result of a succession of relationships, exponentially derived, and compounded by time. So although we cannot build what took billions of years to make, we can create conditions conducive to re-connectivity and therefore, restoration of form and function.

A New Urban Ecology

American Scientist, 2000

An evolutionary complex systems perspective on urban health

Socio-Economic Planning Sciences, 2020

Deliberations about how to govern complex problems of urban health and wellbeing sustainably have often been implicitly biased by ideas such as being 'human-scale' or 'people-centered.' With increasing urban populations and increasing urban system interconnectivity, many cities have transformed into city regions or clusters, and the external effects of urban growth are carried mainly by the marginalized and the environment putting urban health increasingly at risk. Here we address the question of why human societies have not been better at collectively adapting to the challenges of urbanization and global environmental change? We build a theoretical framework of multi-level selection, complex systems evolution, and governance, following which we then present 'human-scale' and 'people-centered' ideas of urban development as expressions of two types of sociopolitical organization with different degrees of self-organization. We found several reasons for which the maladies of current urban development emerged and the seeming inability to resolve them. First, urban systems became increasingly interconnected and evolved into ultrasocial superorganisms, displaying preference to sustain themselves as a whole rather than their subordinates. Second, the difference in scaling effects between the biological and the social network contributed to the mismatch between rapid urban growth and slow adaptation. Furthermore, institutions of decreased variety reinforce themselves and become dominant, creating a positive feedback mechanism and promoting invasive and exploitative exponential growth, but they also reduce the creativity and resilience of urban systems. We also found that both the "human-scale" and the "people-centered" approaches acknowledge the exponential growth and decreasing variety in urban systems, and advocate for correcting the mismatches. To incorporate people's needs and values for long-term, truly sustainable urban health governance, we recommend combining the self-organizing, evolutionary feature of "human-scale" and the coordinative, political feature of "people-centeredness."

ECOSYSTEM TRANSITION OF THE CITY An Impossible option

According to the UN-Habitat 2020 Population Data Booklet, the world population living in the existing 1934 large metropolises is 2.6 billion people: one-third of the world's population. By the year 2050 will be 66% of the world population living in cities. Urban agglomerations today occupy 7.6% of land mass of the planet. Data that obliges us to continue with an in-depth and critical review of the advent of contemporary cities whose growth pattern is unsustainable: the current development of cities occurs in a dynamic independent of geographical contiguity, ignoring codes coming from land, water, atmosphere and from the vegetal ecosystems. Aspect that is potentiated by the advancement of the communications technology that creates a strong impact on the urban transformations that seems dispense the "obstacle" space according to the apparent needs of "liquid society". The Nature and City have lost their binding force of deep symbolic synthesis due to the explosion of the "symbolic" force of the metropolises that is transformed into predatory, anonymous, uncontrollable forces, with obvious disastrous sequences for the balance of the world. Today is imperative to stop and look carefully at the real interrelationships that the coexistence of natural and built elements suppose in the midst of the chaotic situation of contemporary cities where the ecosystem transition, like a possible future, looks for the moment really impossible.

Socio-eco-evolutionary dynamics in cities

2021

Cities are uniquely complex systems regulated by interactions and feedbacks between nature and human society. Characteristics of human society-including culture, economics, technology and politics-underlie social patterns and activity, creating a heterogeneous environment that can influence and be influenced by both ecological and evolutionary processes. Increasing research on urban ecology and evolutionary biology has coincided with growing interest in eco-evolutionary dynamics, which encompasses the interactions and reciprocal feedbacks between evolution and ecology. Research on both urban evolutionary biology and eco-evolutionary dynamics frequently focuses on contemporary evolution of species that have potentially substantial ecological-and even social-significance. Still, little work fully integrates urban evolutionary biology and eco-evolutionary dynamics, and rarely do researchers in either of these fields fully consider the role of human social patterns and processes. Becaus...

Urban Evolution: The Role of Water

Water, 2015

The structure, function, and services of urban ecosystems evolve over time scales from seconds to centuries as Earth's population grows, infrastructure ages, and sociopolitical values alter them. In order to systematically study changes over time, the concept of "urban evolution" was proposed. It allows urban planning, management, and restoration to move beyond reactive management to predictive management based on past observations of consistent patterns. Here, we define and review a glossary of core concepts for studying urban evolution, which includes the mechanisms of urban selective pressure and urban adaptation. Urban selective pressure is an environmental or societal driver contributing to urban adaptation. Urban adaptation is the sequential process by which an urban structure, function, or services becomes more fitted to its changing environment or human choices. The role of water is vital to driving urban evolution as demonstrated by historical changes in drainage, sewage flows, hydrologic pulses, and long-term chemistry. In the current paper, we show how hydrologic traits evolve across successive generations of urban ecosystems

The Case for an Urban Genome Project A Shortcut to Global Sustainability ?

2011

We live in an urbanizing age, an age when people seeking economic opportunity, better health care and education, and cultural engagement are migrating from the countryside to cities. Despite the popular belief that cities are sites of wasteful consumption and pollution, when properly designed and administered they can have lower per capita environmental impacts than the rural areas from which their populations come. In fact, more and more people living in places where they can potentially consume less is arguably the single most effective way to achieve global sustainability goals (Calthorpe, 2010). Despite the promise of cities, however, they do not automatically become engines for positive social transformation. Every city requires a complicated road map showing which policies, practices, and technologies can move its residents toward a more prosperous, healthier, and environmentally responsible future. Because every metropolitan region has idiosyncrasies that influence the charac...

Urban ecology: advancing science and society

Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, 2014

Global change and the ecology of cities

2008

Abstract: Urban areas are hot spots that drive environmental change at multiple scales. Material demands of production and human consumption alter land use and cover, biodiversity, and hydrosystems locally to regionally, and urban waste discharge affects local to global biogeochemical cycles and climate. For urbanites, however, global environmental changes are swamped by dramatic changes in the local environment. Urban ecology integrates natural and social sciences to study these radically altered local environments and their regional and global effects. Cities themselves present both the problems and solutions to sustainability challenges of an increasingly urbanized world. Keywords: Ecology | Environment | Urbanization Article: Humanity today is experiencing a dramatic shift to urban living. Whereas in 1900 a mere 10% of the global population were urban dwellers, that percentage now exceeds 50% and will rise even more in the next 50 years

The New Global Urban Realm: Complex, Connected, Diffuse, and Diverse Social-Ecological Systems

Sustainability, 2015

Urbanization continues to be a transformative process globally, affecting ecosystem integrity and the health and well being of people around the world. Although cities tend to be centers for both the production and consumption of goods and services that degrade natural environments, there is also evidence that urban ecosystems can play a positive role in sustainability efforts. Despite the fact that most of the urbanization is now occurring in the developing countries of the Global South, much of what we know about urban ecosystems has been developed from studying cities in the United States and across Europe. We propose a conceptual framework to broaden the development of urban ecological research and its application to sustainability. Our framework describes four key contemporary urban features that should be accounted for in any attempt to build a unified theory of cities that contributes to urban sustainability efforts. We evaluated a range of examples from cities around the world, highlighting how urban areas are complex, connected, diffuse and diverse and what these interconnected features mean for the study of urban ecosystems and sustainability.

Editorial: Urban ecologies

Environment and Urbanization, 2006

Kaika, M and Swyngedouw, E (2011) The Urbanization of Nature: Great Promises, Impasse, and New Beginnings In Bridge, G and Watson, S (eds) The New Blackwell Companion to the City. (pp 96-107). Oxford: Blackwell

Viewing the city as a process of continuous, but contested, socio-ecological change … unlocks new arenas for thinking and acting on the city. The tensions, conflicts and forces that flow with this process through the body, the city, the region and the globe show the cracks in the lines, the meshes in the net, the spaces and plateaus of resistance and of power.

Shifting forward: Urban ecology in perspective

Ambio, 2024

The world has become urban; cities increasingly shape our worldviews, relation to other species, and the largescale, 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 reexamines 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.

A conceptual framework for the study of human ecosystems in urban areas

Urban Ecosystems, 1997

The need for integrated concepts, capable of satisfying natural and social scientists and supporting integrated research, motivates a conceptual framework for understanding the role of humans in ecosystems. The question is how to add humans to the ecological models used to understand urban ecosystems. The ecosystem concept can serve as the basis, but specific social attributes of humans and their institutions must be added. Learning and feedback between the human and natural components of urban ecosystems are key attributes of the integrated model. Parallels with familiar ecological approaches can help in understanding the ecology of urban ecosystems. These include the role of spatial heterogeneity and organizational hierarchies in both the social and natural components of urban ecosystems. Although urban watersheds are commonly highly altered, the watershed approach can serve as a spatial basis for organizing comparative studies of ecosystems exhibiting differing degrees of urbanization. The watershed concept can also spatially organize the hierarchically scaled linkages by which the integrated human ecosystem model can be applied. The study of urban ecosystems is a relatively new field, and the questions suggested by the integrated framework can be used to frame ecosystem research in and associated with urban and metropolitan areas.

Advancing Urban Ecology toward a Science of Cities

Urban ecology is a field encompassing multiple disciplines and practical applications and has grown rapidly. However, the field is heterogeneous as a global inquiry with multiple theoretical and conceptual frameworks, variable research approaches, and a lack of coordination among multiple schools of thought and research foci. Here, we present an international consensus on how urban ecology can advance along multiple research directions. There is potential for the field to mature as a holistic, integrated science of urban systems. Such an integrated science could better inform decisionmakers who need increased understanding of complex relationships among social, ecological, economic, and built infrastructure systems. To advance the field requires conceptual synthesis, knowledge and data sharing, cross-city comparative research, new intellectual networks, and engagement with additional disciplines. We consider challenges and opportunities for understanding dynamics of urban systems. We suggest pathways for advancing urban ecology research to support the goals of improving urban sustainability and resilience, conserving urban biodiversity, and promoting human well-being on an urbanizing planet.

The city biosphere: A novel theoretical and experimental methodology for the identification of catalysing mutations in city generation, assembly and development

This paper introduces a new experimental city generation, assembly and development platform, the urban mutations platform. We describe in detail a methodology for modeling urban systems and their dynamics, based on self-organization principles. The urban area is seen as an organism comprised of different "body parts", the urban subunits. Upon creation of an initial 3D urban environment, it is possible to add to the subunits the so-called mutations, i.e. structural and functional components that can have beneficial or detrimental effects to the future city development. After addition of the mutations we allow the city to reorganize itself and observe possible changes in the urban configuration. These changes can be directly correlated to the added mutations and their urban qualities and allow us to probe the effect that different structural and functional elements have on the dynamic behaviour of the city, when placed at specific locations.