To the Point:
- Urban science, policy, key insight: Cities play a crucial role in climate change and innovation, requiring research that connects their unique features with common patterns to guide sustainable policies.
- Research integration, interdisciplinary data: Combining general and specific perspectives helps researchers understand cities' roles in the Earth system and supports effective, fair policy-making.
- Four principles, transdisciplinary approach: The study proposes involving communities and policy makers from the start, maintaining data hubs with diverse expertise, using case studies to refine theories, and fostering ongoing dialogue among all stakeholders.
Cities have common features that can be compared as well as unique features that must be taken into account. These photos of Venice (above) and Berlin (below) show apartments, businesses, and monumental architecture occuring in both cities but also reveal specific features that must be taken into account.
© Above: Mayumi Maciel via Pexels. Below: Esteban Arango via Pexels
As the world's population becomes more and more urban, cities are emerging as key components of the Anthropocene - both as major contributors to climate change and as potential trendsetters for innovation and action. But in order to understand the role of cities in the Earth system and chart sustainable pathways to the future, researchers face a daunting challenge: integrating diverse interdisciplinary data and translating the findings into effective, equitablie policy.
Now, in a new paper in Nature Cities, an international team of researchers offer a way forward, arguing for workflows that bring particularising perspectives and generalising perspectives together and long-term institutional spaces that stimulate constant interaction between researchers, publics, and policy makers.
"Decisions made in cities today will shape the future of humanity for generations," says Patrick Roberts, director of the Department of Coevolution of Land Use and Urbanisation at the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology (MPI GEA), and lead author of the study. "To make informed decisions, we need particularising and generalising perspectives, insights from the past and present, and policy and academic debates to be in constant engagement."
The study presents four principles for designing spaces and workflows for transdisciplinary urban science:
Workflows in urban studies should involve policy makers, researchers, and the local public to ensure that data is both generalizable for urban research and specific to the needs and histories of the particular city
© Roberts, et al., Nature Cities, 2026
- Generalising and particularising research areas are brought together with urban communities and policy makers from the beginning, to build theory and identify pressing areas, making the most of existing knowledge in data collection
- Transdisciplinary data hubs are maintained by researchers with both generalising and particularising specialties to develop standard definitions and practices
- Novel case studies are used to test generalities, refine theory, and update models rather than being isolated as 'exceptions'
- 'Generalisers' and 'particularisers' come together to discuss and present results to community organisations and policy makers
These principles come out of a recent conference at MPI GEA, Connecting Urbanism Across Time and Space, which brought together urban scientists, physicists, mathematicians, biologists, archaeologists, historians, anthropologists, and artists, including many policy advisors and researchers involved in the next Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report.
"The particularist and generalist traditions are not only compatible but deeply intertwined," says Christopher Carleton, co-author and senior scientist at MPI GEA. "And both are required for understanding the urban past and anticipating the global urban future."
