Linking insights for local action and global relevance from scholarly publishing

Cities and scholars face linked challenges and opportunities around sustainability. Cities must keep abreast of the latest research while being expected to inform that research to keep it realistic and timely. For example, residents, civil servants, and policymakers in coastal cities would benefit from timely projections of changes in climate and population to be resilient to impacts of future floods. At the same time, researchers studying urban flood resilience should understand local realities and options for action. Scholarly publications link cities grappling to develop sustainably with scholars trying to understand and inform those efforts. This session convenes editors, scholars, and practitioners to suggest how these cutting-edge knowledge products catalyze and constrain sustainable urban transformations.

Scholarly publications are the expected outlets for research findings, and these outlets, in turn, feed media coverage and government, nonprofit, and business reports, both reporting on and informing local action. Despite a surge of research publications on sustainable cities, the gap between knowledge and practice has arguably widened, reflecting in part the challenge of translating across scales. Consider two examples. One paper uses data on thousands of cities worldwide to quantify coastal flooding, demographic changes, and city flood plans. Such urban science reveals global patterns of urban change, yet practitioners find it difficult to use these to inform their local actions. Another paper explores the nuanced case of a given city’s or neighborhood’s vulnerability and resilience to flooding. The findings illuminate functional solutions to local problems, but the implications for advancing urban sustainability more broadly can be obscure. Scholarly publishing aspires to translate usefully in service of the UN Sustainable Development Goals, but in both these cases, something is lost in translation.

We convene this Urban Library session to consider scholarly publishing as a translational technology with its own culture, offering evidence from its producers, users, and caretakers on better bridging local actions and global insights and agendas. An international group of five panelists spanning research publishing, academia, and practice will use the journal Nature Cities as a common point of reference. The moderator will prompt panelists to suggest, based on their experiences, 1) How did you navigate the expectation to use local insights for global relevance? 2) How did publication formats, such as research papers versus short or long opinion pieces, affect your options to translate across the local-global gape? 3) Ideally, what new formats or other vehicles, like podcasts or other media, could help? 4) How did scholarly communication norms, including English usage and figure standards, affect what you communicated? As cities act locally while thinking globally, publishers aspiring to partner with them must as well.