Teaching Cities to Work With Nature: How Living Labs Are Rewriting Built Environment Education

Cities are drowning in their own infrastructure. More than half of humanity now lives in urban areas where stormwater systems buckle under unpredictable rainfall, heat islands intensify summer extremes, and ecosystems quietly degrade beneath concrete and asphalt. For decades, engineers and planners have responded with grey infrastructure—pipes, culverts, and hard surfaces designed to control individual hazards. But a growing body of research argues that this paradigm is fundamentally limited: it may manage a flood or a heatwave in isolation, yet it rarely strengthens ecosystem services, enhances social welfare, or builds long-term climate resilience all at once. Nature-based solutions, which harness ecological processes to deliver environmental, social, and economic co-benefits, have emerged as a compelling alternative. The catch, according to a new review published in Discover Education, is that the professionals who will design these solutions are still being trained in curricula built for a different century.

The study, led by John Ogbeleakhu Aliu of the University of Georgia and the University of Johannesburg, together with colleagues including Ayodeji Emmanuel Oke, Kong Fah Tee, Douglas Aghimien, and Clinton Aigbavboa, set out to answer a deceptively simple question: how should universities teach nature-based solutions to the architects, engineers, and construction managers of the future? The answer matters because the effectiveness and scalability of nature-based interventions depend not just on technology or institutional capacity, but on whether higher education can produce graduates who understand, design, implement, and evaluate them. The researchers frame this challenge within the broader transition toward Industry 5.0 and Education 5.0, which shift emphasis from automation and digitalization toward human-centeredness, sustainability, and resilience—expanding what future professionals are expected to know and do.

To map the landscape, the team adopted a mixed-methods design that combined quantitative bibliometrics with a qualitative systematic review. They searched the Scopus database for peer-reviewed journal articles published between 2015 and 2026, a window chosen to align with the United Nations’ 2030 Agenda and its seventeen Sustainable Development Goals. The bibliometric analysis ultimately captured 919 documents from 246 sources, processed using VOSviewer version 1.6.20 and R Studio version 4.4.2. From that pool, the researchers applied the PRISMA framework—the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses—to filter records through successive rounds of screening, narrowing the field to 26 studies for in-depth qualitative synthesis. The dual approach allowed them to chart the intellectual structure of the field while simultaneously evaluating which pedagogical strategies actually work.

The bibliometric results reveal a field in explosive adolescence. Output was minimal in the early years, with a single publication recorded in 2015 and fewer than ten annually before 2017, but growth accelerated sharply from 2021 onward, peaking at 266 publications in 2025—an annual growth rate of 48.42 percent. The average document age is just 2.79 years, yet documents average 26.47 citations, underscoring both the field’s novelty and its influence. Keyword analysis traces a conceptual migration: early niche topics such as multifunctionality, urban agriculture, and well-being gave way to integrative concepts like urban green infrastructure, circular economy, and cities. Today, the most frequent keywords are green infrastructure with 140 occurrences, urban planning with 115, and ecosystem services with 90, while nature-based solutions itself dominates as the most recent and most common cluster, appearing 404 times with a median year of 2024—a sign of growing definitional coherence.

Geography tells its own story. China leads raw output with 127 publications, followed by Italy with 91 and the United States with 64, but the United Kingdom, with 60 articles, shows the highest proportion of internationally collaborative work at a multiple-country publication ratio of 0.550. Citation impact complicates the picture further: although China leads in total citations with 3,389, the Netherlands achieves the highest average citation count per article at 87.80, with Germany close behind at 52.30. Notably, no African country appears among the top ten in either total or average citations—a regional gap the authors flag as evidence of inequity in global knowledge production. The most cited works shaping the field include Kabisch and colleagues’ seminal 2016 analysis of urban nature-based solutions for climate mitigation, Keesstra and colleagues’ work on land management and ecosystem services, and Chan and colleagues’ study of China’s Sponge City flood-management concept.

Keyword co-occurrence network analysis, using a minimum threshold of 40 occurrences, organized 43 keywords into three clusters that together define the field’s knowledge structure. The largest cluster centers on urban sustainability and planning integration, encompassing adaptive management, biodiversity, climate change, green infrastructure, and sustainable development. A second cluster captures applied socio-environmental themes such as land use, urban growth, and vegetation, while a third focuses on risk, resilience, and water management, including flooding, stormwater, runoff, and decision making. The picture that emerges is of an interdisciplinary field consolidating around three dominant domains: planning integration, applied socio-environmental systems, and climate-responsive hazard reduction.

The systematic review of 26 studies then turned to the educational core of the question, and its findings are strikingly consistent. Coding of reported competencies revealed six distinct clusters: cognitive-systemic competencies such as systems thinking and interdisciplinary problem-solving; environmental and ecological competencies built through direct engagement with ecosystems; technical and design competencies spanning green building technologies and biomimicry-inspired solutions; resource management and circularity competencies covering sustainable materials and water quality; collaborative and participatory competencies developed through co-design and stakeholder engagement; and socio-emotional and ethical competencies including critical thinking, social empathy, and sustainability-oriented mindsets. Constructed wetlands served as living laboratories for exploring water pollution dynamics, campus edible gardens strengthened empathy and community engagement, and biomimicry-based design exercises promoted ecological sensitivity and creativity. Several studies even reported emotional resilience and transformative learning outcomes, suggesting that witnessing the results of one’s own interventions can reshape professional identity itself.

On the teaching side, the review identified six corresponding clusters of pedagogical strategies. Experiential and field-based learning dominated, with nature-based solutions functioning not as case examples but as active pedagogical environments—real wetlands, river restoration sites, and campus ecosystems where theory meets hydrology. Project-based and problem-based learning positioned nature-based solutions as answers to authentic sustainability challenges, from climate-responsive architecture studios to engineering coursework on water quality improvement. Collaborative and transdisciplinary approaches forced convergence among engineering, environmental science, and design perspectives, while participatory and co-design methods brought real users and decision-makers into the educational process. Simulation and analytical tools, such as the EASED sustainable design platform, allowed students to model and optimize scenarios in controlled settings, and reflective, transformative learning helped students internalize the broader implications of their work for climate resilience and socio-ecological well-being.

The authors interpret these findings through two established learning frameworks. In terms of Bloom’s revised taxonomy, nature-based solutions education appears to move students beyond remembering and understanding toward applying, analyzing, evaluating, and creating—students analyze interconnected socio-ecological systems, weigh competing interventions, and design context-sensitive solutions. Fink’s taxonomy of significant learning adds further dimensions: application, integration, the human dimension, and caring all map onto the collaborative, participatory, and reflective elements of nature-based pedagogy. The practical implication is that nature-based solutions should not be treated as optional sustainability content bolted onto existing courses, but as authentic learning contexts through which entire curricula can be restructured around competency development.

Yet the study is candid about the field’s shortcomings. Implementation remains uneven across disciplines and regions, engineering and construction programs still prioritize grey infrastructure paradigms, and standardized metrics for assessing competency development are largely absent, making it difficult to compare outcomes across programs or countries. The authors call for longitudinal studies tracking whether competencies persist into professional practice, validated assessment instruments aligned with higher-order learning levels, and integration of nature-based solutions into formal accreditation standards so that sustainability competencies become embedded rather than elective. They also acknowledge that their analysis drew only on Scopus-indexed literature, potentially excluding relevant work in other databases and regional journals. Still, the central message lands with force: as cities confront escalating climate pressures, the universities training the next generation of built environment professionals have both the evidence and the pedagogical toolkit to teach students how to design cities that work with nature rather than against it. What remains is the institutional will to embed that lesson across the curriculum.

Subject of Research: Integration of nature-based solutions into built environment higher education to develop sustainability competencies

Article Title: Nature-based solutions in built environment education for developing sustainability competencies through bibliometric and systematic analysis

Article References: Nature-based solutions in built environment education for developing sustainability competencies through bibliometric and systematic analysis. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1007/s44217-026-02114-4

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44217-026-02114-4

Keywords: nature-based solutions, built environment education, sustainability competencies, bibliometric analysis, systematic review, experiential learning, ecological literacy, systems thinking, green infrastructure, higher education, urban resilience, Education 5.0