Urbanization brings benefits like housing and jobs but also challenges like biodiversity loss. CML's Urban research program uses science to create sustainable cities, focusing on the built environment (circular economy, urban mining) and enhancing urban nature for biodiversity and human benefits.

The urban graveyard presents several studies in which the results of older archaeological and osteoarchaeological research are compared to more recent excavation data from several Dutch, Belgian and Danish cities and towns.

How many species of plants, animals and fungi live in urban nature? in 2026 are Leiden, Leiderdorp, Oegstgeest and Katwijk observing and recording how many unique species there are, to put the state of urban nature on the map. Together everyone from May 1st till 30th of June will record every spider,…

Cities play an increasingly important role in today's global challenges: climate change, inequality, safety and health. Our Urban Studies programme gives you the opportunity to become a problem solver, equipping you to develop real-life answers to today’s and tomorrow’s urban challenges.

TruLife applies lessons from the study of long-term urban traditions, exemplified by pre-Columbian Maya tropical cities, to present-day sustainable urban design.

From Los Angeles to Tokyo, Urban Sociolinguistics is a sociolinguistic study of twelve urban settings around the world.

This volume investigates how urban growth and prosperity transformed the cities of the Roman Mediterranean in the last centuries BCE and the first centuries CE, integrating debates about Roman urban space with discourse on Roman urban history.

How do we explain the fact that certain areas had many large cities, while other areas were studded with large numbers of small towns and yet other areas had very few urban agglomerations of any kind?

The KLM Urban Trail Series is a hugely popular series of running trails in the Netherlands that are a unique way to explore a city centre. This year Wijnhaven is opening its doors to the runners. Join in with the fourth edition of the KLM Urban Trail in The Hague on Sunday 7 July.

Study information, Online Experience

Central to this research is the Urban Future-project, which consists of a large archive of artworks made from 2002 until now.

This project uses archaeological, literary and epigraphic evidence to investigate urban development in Roman-period North Africa, compiling this in a GIS-linked database in order to analyse the development of urban settlement spatially over time.

What is the size and composition of the Dutch urban mine? How will the urban mine develop over time, and how can it be used as a source of materials as part of a circular economy?

The Hortus botanicus Leiden connects science with the public. Through our research, we explore how people experience and appreciate nature while addressing key societal challenges.

How humans and rats cohabit the cityscape and what consequences this has for both sides of the conflict?

The first objective is to create a catalogue raisonée, i.e. a structured database that will store the main attributes of each town in a standardized format database, which will be freely accessible when completed; the second objective is to exploit theories and methods that can help us to understand…

This thesis analyses the existence and the functioning of the urban labour market in the early Roman empire by looking at the crucial influence of social structures, such as the family and non-familial labour collectives.

This volume, featuring sixteen contributions from leading Roman historians and archaeologists, sheds new light on approaches to the economic history of urban craftsmen and traders in the Roman world, with a particular emphasis on the imperial period.

As part of the Leiden Heritage Deal, the Municipality of Leiden collaborates with Leiden University, Naturalis, and the Leiden Regional Heritage Office, to study the climate challenges facing the city centre and its historic green and blue networks. The goal is to contribute to a biodiverse, climate-resilient…

Urbanisation is steadily increasing with estimates expecting that 68% of the global population will live in cities by 2050. To accommodate the rural to urban transition, large quantities of land are transformed from natural to urban lands.

They are often little more than a square metre of plants, yet pavement gardens are a source of life. PhD candidate Joeri Morpurgo conducted research in the centre of Amsterdam and The Hague and discovered how important small green spaces are, especially for cities.

This projects investigates spatial relations between soils and other resources and the urban layout of a classic Maya center in Campeche, Mexico.

Conventional food supplies procured from rural areas are increasingly vulnerable to disruptions caused by extreme weather, geopolitical instability, and logistical bottlenecks.

What was the nature of the urban network in the Roman provinces of Germania Superior, Raetia and Noricum and how stood this in relation with economic and social developments?

How did slaves in the eighteenth century manage to empower themselves and their kin, and why did this become all the more difficult in the nineteenth century?

Innovation in nest building: bird nests made from anti-bird spikes. Researchers from Naturalis Biodiversity Center and the Natural History Museum Rotterdam describe this behaviour in a publication.

The principle aim of the project is to study the genesis and the quantitative properties of the Early Roman urban network of the Balkan and the Danube provinces.

During the autumn semester (September-December), NIMAR offers a joint LDE (Leiden-Delft-Erasmus) minor Urban Studies in Morocco: Cities in Transformation (30 EC), an interdisciplinary programme focused on contemporary urban change in Morocco. The minor combines humanities, social sciences, design and…

The multiple connections between emblematics and Natural History in the broader perspective of their underlying artistic, literary, political and religious ideologies.

The central aims of this project are to establish the shapes of the various urban hierarchies existing in the provinces of the Roman Empire and (especially) to use the quantitative properties of these hierarchies to shed new light on levels of economic integration.

This thesis addresses the challenge of sustainable urban development by analyzing the interplay between green and grey infrastructure to optimize resource use and ecosystem services.

The use of increasingly large and diverse datasets to guide urban climate action has implications for how, and by whom, local governments are held accountable.

This research project focuses on the development of a popular national agency in late nineteenth century Amsterdam and the question how ‘ordinary’ citizens imagined ‘the Netherlands’ through the experience and use of their urban surroundings.

How do urban residents in Brazil and the Netherlands (The Hague and Leiden) perceive the cultural benefits of urban forests? How are these benefits spatially distributed across cities? How do socio-demographic factors shape these perceptions, and do these differences vary between countries?

Green spaces boost mental health—especially in busy cities. A new study from Leiden and Stanford University reveals how nature benefits urban well-being and offers low-cost ways to make city life healthier for everyone.

How can photorealistic 3D scenes help predict whether interventions in urban public spaces will foster citizens' sense of security?

Research in the natural computing group covers theoretical foundations, the development of new algorithms, and interdisciplinary applications of natural computing methods.

This book explores the relationship between the production of new urban spaces and illiberal community-making in contemporary India. It is based on an ethnographic study in Noida, a city at the eastern fringe of the state of Uttar Pradesh, bordering national capital Delhi.

Imagining Urban Complexity introduces passionate and critical perspectives on the link between the humanities and urban studies.

Your local city park may be improving your health, according to a new paper led by Leiden environmental scientist Roy Remme. In Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Remme and his colleagues describe how access to nature increases people’s physical activity—and therefore overall health—in…