Enabling urban systems transformations: co-developing national and local strategies.

Unlabelled: Transformative urban development is urgent to achieve future sustainable development and wellbeing. Transformation can benefit from shared and cumulative learning on strategies to guide urban development across local to national scales, while also reflecting the complex emergent nature of urban systems, and the need for context-specific and place-based solutions. The article addresses this challenge, drawing on extensive transdisciplinary engagement and National Strategy co-development processes for Australia.

A transformative mission for prioritising nature in Australian cities.

Australia is experiencing mounting pressures related to processes of urbanisation, biodiversity loss and climate change felt at large in cities. At the same time, it is cities that can take the leading role in pioneering approaches and solutions to respond to those coupling emergencies. In this perspective piece we respond to the following question: What are the required transformations for prioritising, valuing, maintaining and embracing nature in cities in Australia? We adopt the mission framework as an organising framework to present proposed pathways to transform Australian cities as nature-positive places of the future.

Urban vegetation for reducing heat related mortality.

The potential benefit of urban vegetation in reducing heat related mortality in the city of Melbourne, Australia is investigated using a two-scale modelling approach. A meso-scale urban climate model was used to quantify the effects of ten urban vegetation schemes on the current climate in 2009 and future climates in 2030 and 2050. The indoor thermal performance of five residential buildings was then simulated using a building simulation tool with the local meso-climates associated with various urban vegetation schemes.

Climate change and health in the urban environment: adaptation opportunities in Australian cities.

Urban populations are growing rapidly throughout the Asia-Pacific region. Cities are vulnerable to the health impacts of climate change because of their concentration of people and infrastructure, the physical (geographical, material, and structural) attributes of the built environment, and the ecological interdependence with the urban ecosystem. Australia is one of the most highly urbanized countries in the region and its already variable climate is set to become hotter and drier with climate change.

A social-ecological perspective on health in urban environments.

Human health in our cities is an expression of complex social and environmental interactions not previously faced in our long evolutionary history. In this paper, we present a social-ecological perspective on the complex nature of emerging public health problems in cities and identify some of the research questions emerging from this new view of the city. We argue that an integrative urban science agenda is needed not only to inform urban policy, planning and design, but also to alert people to the consequences of and trade-offs around their choices and behaviours.