Insights/Opinion: Emerging Scientific Frameworks and Tools for Sustainable Cities

Despite growing evidence of general patterns of urban development, urban planning and policy have remained largely normative, still lacking the conceptual frameworks and technical tools to learn cumulatively from work around the world and to extrapolate to entirely new situations, such as future sustainable cities. I argue here that a deeper understanding of urban processes using scientific methods appropriate to the study of cities and human development provides a host of new concepts and tools for this purpose. The present discussion gives a brief overview of the emerging conceptual and empirical basis for these findings. It illustrates the approach with the description of two conceptual tools, (i) the human-centric city, and (ii) the circularity diagram for material flows. These tools show how fundamental urban concepts can be articulated to analyze specific contextual situations and expand equity and sustainability in explicitly diverse, connected, and fast-changing cities.