npj Urban Sustainability

Aims & Scope

npj Urban Sustainability publishes inter- and cross-disciplinary research that advances understanding of how cities and urban regions can thrive within planetary constraints—by reducing risk at its source, restoring ecological functions, and enabling equitable wellbeing. Building on the field’s strong foundations in sustainability, resilience and adaptation, the journal actively encourages work that moves toward regenerative and restorative urban futures, including research that designs, tests, evaluates, and scales solutions in real-world contexts. We welcome contributions that bridge urban social–ecological and social-technological systems, spanning theory, methods, and application. Priority is given to work that is problem-driven, policy-relevant, and actionable, including comparative and synthesis studies, community-centred research, and studies led from and with the Global South, as well as work on small and intermediate cities, peri-urban regions, and informal contexts. The journal covers a broad range of topics, including but not limited to: Sustainable urban planning, design, and infrastructure transitions Climate mitigation, resilience, risk reduction, and regenerative strategies Urban nature, biodiversity, ecosystem connectivity, and advanced nature-based solutions Water-wise cities: drought, flood, circular water systems and catchment-scale governance Urban heat, health, and climate-sensitive urban form Urban food systems, urban agriculture, and metabolic flows Digitalization, smart cities, urban AI, and responsible data governance Methods for urban data collection, modelling, scenario analysis, monitoring, evaluation, and decision support Social equity, justice, security, demographic trends and inclusive development; distributional impacts and “who benefits” Policy, institutions, finance, and governance for sustainability transformations We generally do not consider studies with purely local descriptive results based on a single or limited number of case studies, unless they offer transferable insights, significant methodological advances and clear general implications for urban sustainability science and policy. npj Urban Sustainability is an online-only, fully open-access journal within the Nature Portfolio’s npj Series , led by an international editorial team committed to rigorous, inclusive, and high-quality scholarship, fostering scientific integrity and promoting academic freedom and global partnerships across research communities.

A twelfth criterion — whether APC fees are clearly disclosed — is not scored here; it is left out of the total rather than counted as a failure. Publication charges appear in the metrics card above.

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Source: OpenAlex · Each year’s green bar = citations earned by that year’s papers, counted to date — so recent years look lower simply because their papers haven’t had time to be cited yet.

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Subject Classification