The past decade has witnessed a dramatic increase in what we now define as urban informatics. Different urban sectors, theories, and technologies have become more specialized while being more deeply intertwined with the mission of city planning to reach for sustainable development goals. Urban informatics thus gains great popularity by providing a transdisciplinary approach to better understand and solve the unprecedentedly complex urban issues by leveraging new information technologies.

Following the establishment of the International Conference on Urban Informatics (ICUI),Footnote 1 the setting up of the International Society for Urban Informatics (ISUI),Footnote 2 and the publication of the book Urban Informatics, Footnote 3 the start of an Urban Informatics journal is a further major move to push forward urban informatics as a discipline. ICUI and ISUI bring together people from a wide range of fields pertaining to urban informatics and these new resources provide platforms for their communication. The new journal aims to motivate high-quality publications and accumulate knowledge for the discipline of urban informatics. Compared with other journals related to urban science, informatics, or geomatics, this journal Urban Informatics emphasizes:

  • The latest findings in urban science supported by informatics and geomatics;

  • Innovations in informatics and geomatics that contribute to urban science and solutions to urban issues; and

  • Studies of the impacts of these innovations on urban society;

  • Transdisciplinary theoretical, methodological, and technological developments in urban informatics.

As the launch of this first journal is exclusively for the field of urban informatics, it is useful to look back in retrospect at the development in this field, and, more importantly, to explore the research initiatives which serve as a reference point for its future development. Such a review and research initiatives are presented in the first substantial article in this issue by the editors and colleagues, in which the initiatives cover three levels, namely the future of urban science, backbone technologies, and urban applications, as well as the relationships between these domains (Shi et al. 2022). Then, Goodchild (2022) elaborates some of the major challenges of Big Data as an infrastructure in Urban Informatics, including data integration, accuracy and uncertainty, data ownership, the locations of computing, etc. Batty (2022) compares spatial interaction with space syntax and provides a basic framework for comparing primals and duals from a complex network perspective at different scales. Li et al. (2022) conduct a literature review of the measurements, spatial patterns, underlying causes, and social consequences of spatial segregation, and further discuss the extent to which activity space methods can advance segregation research from a people-based perspective. Lyu et al. (2022) develop a framework for predicting urban heat islands (UHI) with data from a high-frequency urban sensor network combined with satellite remote sensing; the random forest regression model outperforms other models with higher prediction accuracy in their specific case study.

This journal will be a platform where expertise working on different disciplines related to the cities come together to advance their digital transformation and livability through research in urban informatics. It is hoped that the long-term efforts of the journal will make a significant contribution to the maturation of this young but highly promising discipline.