Urban Air Pollution: New Insights into Exposure and Health Risks

Dear Colleagues,

Urban air pollution remains one of the most significant threats to public health, contributing to millions of premature deaths worldwide each year, and with almost everyone on Earth breathing air that fails to meet health guidelines. Cities are hotspots of exposure due to traffic, industry, wildfires, and extreme heat, and these burdens fall disproportionately on urban communities. Although advances in transportation, energy, and work patterns are reshaping emissions, pollution from vehicles and other sources persists. Emerging tools such as low-cost sensors, mobile monitoring, satellite data, and machine learning now enable detailed, high-resolution mapping of air pollution exposures. Nevertheless, there remains an urgent need for research that explores multipollutant mixtures, combined effects with heat and noise, and the health implications of evolving technologies and urban lifestyles.

This Special Issue invites innovative research and reviews that deepen understanding of urban air pollution exposure and health risks, and we welcome contributions from exposure science, environmental epidemiology, toxicology, urban planning, data science, health equity, atmospheric chemistry, and policy analysis. Submissions may include original research articles, systematic reviews, meta-analyses, methodological papers, case studies, and policy evaluations addressing (but not limited to) the following areas of interest:

• Exposure assessment: Novel measurement methods (mobile and personal sensors, satellite‑derived estimates, and low‑cost sensor networks), modelling approaches (e.g., agent‑based simulations, land‑use regression, and chemical transport models) and data fusion strategies to characterize spatial and temporal variability of pollutants in urban micro‑environments.
• Multipollutant mixtures and co‑exposures: Studies examining combined effects of chemical pollutants (PM_2.5, ultrafine particles, black carbon, ozone, NO₂, volatile organic compounds, metals, microplastics) with non‑chemical stressors such as heat, noise and psychosocial stress, including mechanistic and epidemiological investigations.
• Health outcomes across the life course: Investigations of acute and chronic effects on respiratory, cardiovascular, neurological, metabolic, and reproductive outcomes; evaluations of susceptible populations (children, pregnant people, older adults, workers, and people with pre‑existing disease); and environmental justice analyses quantifying disparities in exposure levels and health impacts.
• Emerging sources and technologies: Assessments of the exposure and health risks associated with electric vehicles, shared mobility, telecommuting, renewable energy, industrial decarbonization, non‑tailpipe emissions, and wildfire or agricultural burning; investigations of how fleet turnover and alternative fuels influence exposure and health.
• Policy, interventions and community engagement: Evaluations of air quality regulations, low‑emission zones, green infrastructure, urban design, public transit improvements and building ventilation; community‑based participatory research and citizen‑science projects; and translations of findings into recommendations that inform policy and foster climate‑resilient urban planning.
• Methodological innovations: Development or application of causal inference methods, exposomic approaches, high‑throughput toxicology, machine learning, and risk‑assessment frameworks tailored to multipollutant exposures.

Dr. Inkyu Han
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Urban Science is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• exposure assessment
• multipollutants
• health risk
• life course
• emerging sources
• community engagement
• exposome
• machine learning