A global network of researchers from Oxford, China, India, South Africa, and Colombia is training a new generation of urban scientists to tackle the intertwined challenges of fast-growing cities in developing countries. This matters because most of the world’s population now lives in cities, and nearly all of the UN Sustainable Development Goals must be achieved within these urban environments. Current knowledge is fragmented across disciplines like engineering, public health, law, and anthropology, leaving policymakers without the integrated understanding needed to manage rapid urbanisation. The project fills this gap by combining complex systems modelling with on-the-ground data from cities themselves. If successful, the research could reshape how city governments manage housing, transport, water, energy, and public health simultaneously—rather than treating each as a separate problem. It aims to produce practical tools and co-produced knowledge that help cities shift toward more sustainable development pathways. The network will link urban labs and observatories across the global south and north, connecting findings to organisations such as UN-Habitat and the World Bank. The work is applied and policy-facing, not fundamental science.
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We propose to generate a step change in the capacity of a network of cities in developing countries to address development dilemmas and advance the new 'urban' Sustainable Development Goal (11), linking cutting edge research to governance challenges of the emerging metropolis. The contemporary city presents a major development challenge. The majority of the world now lives in cities and the proportion is set to increase rapidly. All SDGs will need to be achieved in emergent cities and through understanding the combination of different development challenges, simultaneously realized. To recognize this and address the development challenges we need to combine the insights of traditionally discrete disciplinary expertise and link the humanities, natural sciences and social sciences in a new interdisciplinary configuration. We propose to 'grow' a new generation of urban researchers comfortable taking forward this new interdisciplinary field, working across an international partnership of research intensive universities renowned for their expertise in analyzing contemporary urbanisms. A global team of partners from China (Peking University), India (India Institute of Human Settlements), South Africa (UCT African Centre for Cities) and Colombia (EAFIT, Medellin) will work together with the University of Oxford. Researchers work across natural sciences (including mathematics, medicine, transport and engineering), the social sciences (including anthropology, development, migration) and humanities (including law, history). We leverage expertise across the University of Oxford and the Alan Turing Institute, building capacity internationally through a partnership networking strategic sites of urban interventions globally, working with a cohort of postdoctoral fellowships to develop a programme of excellent research. The focus is international and interdisciplinary. International networks build on existing collaborations, strong links to cities themselves and on track records of research excellence. Research proposed uses complex systems framing to synthesise our understanding of the development of future cities. Research addresses urban challenges that focus on data science opportunities of the city and socio-material systems that link built form, technology and behavioural pattern in complex interventions in public health, the nexus of water food and energy, informality, the city commons, mobility, land and the imperative to accommodate new populations. Research embedded in cities themselves will build new forms of learning, co-production and capacity building to promote sustainable urban development. To maximize the impact of our work the five centres of research will create a platform that will link regionally to linked research centres, urban labs and city observatories in Latin America, Africa, India and China. The opportunity to link the challenges of the global south to the city futures of the global north will be addressed through formal links to impact pathways in London government and European Urban Labs and centres, liaising with three of the Innovate UK funded Catapults (Satellite, Transport, Future of Cities). In order to meet the global goals of sustainable development cities will have to fundamentally shift developmental trajectories, implying a significant realignment in urban management practice. The knowledge base on which policy makers are expected to make such momentous decisions is fragmented but we will work with cities across the partnership to develop new models of co-production and knowledge exchange. All of the research partners have outstanding records of engagement and coproduction of knowledge with cities themselves, city regions, national bodies and emergent transnational organisations, including UN Habitat, the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN) and the World Bank/UN agency Cities Alliance.
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