5 Questions With Our Editorial Board
Get to know our Editor-in-Chief and Associate Editors as they each answer 5 questions about their research and experience and share their thoughts about becoming involved with the journal.
Thomas Elmqvist, PhD
Thomas Elmqvist is a Professor of Natural Resource Management at Stockholm University in Sweden.
What is your research background?
I have a background in ecology, for the last 15 years in complex systems analysis.
What is your current research focused on?
Developing empirical and theoretical tools for understanding urbanization and its consequences on local, regional and global scales, analyzing long-distance interactions and what institutional and policy arrangements may be needed for cities becoming effective in creating incentives for sustainable landscape management.
Why did you decide to become involved with npj Urban Sustainability?
I saw there was a great need for a high-quality journal in the field of research on urban sustainability. The fact that it is open access, has research from the Global South as a priority and linked to the SDG 11 were all factors that convinced me this was well worth investing time and energy in.
What are you most looking forward to in your role as Editor-in-Chief?
To be part of supporting the emergence of new theory on urbanization, and in particular pushing for that excellent research coming from urban regions in the Global South will be published in a way that it reaches a very wide audience.
Why should researchers submit their work to npj Urban Sustainability?
The open access aspect will make sure that papers are widely distributed, not only to the academic community but also to urban planners and policy makers. We will strive to maintain a high level of quality in the papers published and will give priority to papers with innovative approaches, hopefully fostering a very vibrant discussion among a diverse community of readers.
Pippin Anderson, PhD
Pippin Anderson is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Environmental and Geographical Science at the University of Cape Town, South Africa.
What is your research background?
My primary training was in botany. I started off doing a degree in English and History but got a job in my first year as part of a large-scale project that was mapping Proteas across South Africa. Through this project I fell in love with the flora of the Cape and quickly abandoned my Humanities degree for one in Science, majoring in botany and ecology. I have always been interested in landscapes and ecologies informed by human influence, and their sustainability. In my MSc I added a conservation biology angle, and my PhD was in the landscape ecology of rangelands. My current research really brings all these elements together where my focus is still mostly on the sustainability of plant communities, but working in a city means the people-element is ever present, as is the need for a conservation view.
What is your current research focused on?
My current research is focused on urban ecology. I am intrigued by the response of landscapes and plant communities to the novel pressures exerted by cities. Cities are such beasts – complex and varied, and full of people acting independently and in unison – it makes them fun and difficult places to research. African cities in particular present a novel space to explore sustainability, where the combination of rapid transition, large tracts of indigenous and wild nature, and the developing world context will surely call for unique solutions to achieving urban sustainability.
While for the most part I remain true to my botanical training, I do dip into other ecological dimensions, for example with the inclusion of some invertebrate work. I have also made the odd foray into more social understandings which is inescapable in cities where people drive the ecology, and I have done some environmental history work, and bits on perceptions and access. In the Cape the biodiversity conservation agenda is particularly strong as we sit with phenomenal, and very localized, plant diversity. My work spans the space between indigenous and city floras and how these function, interact, and contribute to the social and conservation agendas of comparative space, working across cities in the broader southern African region.
I have a secondary, smaller research interest in restoration ecology, with a focus on the Renosterveld vegetation. This is one of the most beleagured vegetation types in the country, and one that used to cover much of the City of Cape Town. The kinds of deep ecological understandings that emerge in the restoration ecology space feed into my broader urban research.
Why did you decide to become involved with npj Urban Sustainability?
It's a great opportunity to be involved in a new, and excellent, journal. It's brilliant that the urban research agenda is getting the kind of recognition that the establishment of npj Urban Sustainability signifies. I also feel that Africa tends to be under-represented in the peer-reviewed literature and I hope to be able to urge local scientists to set their sights on an npj Urban Sustainability contribution.
What are you most looking forward to in your role as Associate Editor?
Journal work exposes you to interesting and often cutting-edge research; you get to engage with reviewers and the review process and then you also get to share ideas and thoughts with your fellow associate editors. These kinds of encounters are truly novel where it's a great collection of people and the catalyst is unknown until it lands on your desk. This makes for unexpected intellectual conversations. I am already enjoying engagements with the team, and envisage lots of debate and discussion – in unanticipated directions – as we dive in. I think the breadth of focus in topic, combined with the tight lens of the challenge of developing sustainable cities, will make for rich discussion.
Why should researchers submit their work to npj Urban Sustainability?
I think to get your research into npj Urban Sustainability is really putting it into the most exciting space in terms of urban sustainability. The breadth of topic, under the tight focus on urban sustainability, combined with the cutting-edge nature of the NPJ 'stable,' makes the journal the very best place for an author to get their research published.
Timon McPhearson, PhD
Timon McPhearson is the Director of the Urban Systems Lab and Associate Professor of Urban Ecology at The New School in New York.
What is your research background?
I am an urban ecologist trained in community and ecosystem ecology with theoretical research in aquatic microcosms and empirical work in urban forests. I have focused on interdisciplinary research in social-ecological systems, resilience theory, and ecosystem services.
What is your current research focused on?
My current research spans a few areas including urban resilience, understanding the environmental justice implications of climate change impacts in cities, multi-hazard risk, and the role of nature-based solutions for climate change adaptation and resilience.
Why did you decide to become involved with npj Urban Sustainability?
I am keen to advance the development of a new, urban systems science that can provide the foundational knowledge for innovative, transdisciplinary understanding of the complexity of cities and how to transform them for sustainability, equity, and resilience. Working with npj Urban Sustainability is a great opportunity to be part of this emerging scientific frontier.
What are you most looking forward to in your role as Associate Editor?
I am excited about the opportunity to read and help shape some of the most advanced urban sustainability science. It is exciting to see how many disciplines are converging to better understand the complexity of patterns and processes in cities and human settlements.
Why should researchers submit their work to npj Urban Sustainability?
Achieving Sustainable Development Goal 11 for "making cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable" is going to require new knowledge, transdisciplinary approaches, and innovation in research and practice. We want to make npj Urban Sustainability the place where this innovative research exists. I invite researchers to consider this journal as the first place to find and submit novel research that can help achieve the goal of more sustainable cities and thus impact the majority of humanity.
Xiaoling Zhang, PhD
Xiaoling Zhang is a Professor in the Department of Public Policy at the City University of Hong Kong.
What is your research background?
As urban population keeps expanding in the planet, the space, scale and speed of urbanization become increasingly dynamic and complex. As an academic in sustainability science, I have been seeking the commonalities, particularities, as well as interactions among socioecological and economic systems in shifting towards sustainability. How is the discourse, narratives and constructives of sustainability made meaningful in real-world urban problems?
Under the theoretical umbrella of sustainability science, I have been working on several interdisciplinary research including (1) theoretical critiques, drivers, evolutionary processes and consequences of urbanization; (2) sustainable urban science and land use change, socioecological systems and political economics of regional studies and (3) cities and climate change, urban resource management and economics, energy transformation and policy at the city scale.
What is your current research focused on?
My current research mainly focuses on sustainability science and resource management, and political economics of environmental studies and energy studies. I also work predominantly with macro-level dynamics in sustainable urbanization, regional and neighborhood change, land use change, urban socio-spatial restructuring, informal and formal policy regime, governance and the interactions between them.
Why did you decide to become involved with npj Urban Sustainability?
There was an urgent call for climate change initiatives of shifting from the national level to cities after the COP22 climate conference in 2016, which made urban become the central territory to combat with carbon emissions and climate change. The contemporary landscape of urban sustainability studies has been experiencing a constant transformation and dynamics in the past decades, which calls for a comprehensive and systematic revisit to this field.
I have been working in sustainability science in the past years. It must be recognized that although the global south countries' cities are growing (e.g., Africa and Asia), a lot of complex urban challenges, negative externalities and risks emerge, such as the climate change events, burden of large-scale epidemic urban diseases arising from high-density regions (e.g., the Coronavirus incurred in China), biodiversity loss, social inequality and un-intended consequences from ill-formed urban systems.
However, there still remains a large gap between existing knowledge and the urban science-policy interfaces. In order to convey the full spectrum of inquiry at the city scale, I wish to contribute my efforts, voices and services in a professional and scholarly way. npj Urban Sustainability publishes inter- and cross-disciplinary research into how cities are reshaping and being reshaped to meet major economic, social and environmental challenges. It thus provides a great platform and common ground for disseminating the most up-to-date knowledge, experiments, managerial solutions as well as comparative scholarship in the urban field.
What are you most looking forward to in your role as Associate Editor?
As an academic, I am fully aware of the importance of making 'Publish or Perish' decisions and actions. npj Urban Sustainability will publish high-quality research, which makes the peer review process, debates and final decision making more difficult. Acting as an Associate Editor, I personally wish to contribute to the communicative, critical, but frustrating review process, which could help urban sustainability communities to encounter the macro, mezzo and micro views and connections between variegated fields among the global scale. Meanwhile, I also wish to do the special collection commissioning work by inviting world renowned scholars across the globe to elucidate the most robust, sophisticated and truly new knowledge in urban research. I also look forward to taking opportunities to introduce our journal's goals and scope and make it well recognized during my lectures at international conferences, academic forums, research seminars and visits to research institutes and universities.
Why should researchers submit their work to npj Urban Sustainability?
Among the sustainability relevant journals, there still remains a missing academic platform to introduce the institutional fuctions (e.g., the urban system), policy regime and managerial solutions to elucidate the frontier knowledge, science-to-practice continuum as well as the policy makers. At this moment, npj Urban Sustainability emerges to publish the critical studies, case studies and impact studies, including policy solutions for existing cities and regions, and projects for new urban developments. Papers are also encouraged that report collaborations between policy makers and practice communities, and research that more generally supports innovation in urban governance and planning. I would recommend that researchers who wish to share their cross-disciplinary methods, new urban insight and local urban experiments submit their articles to the journal.