This Think20 (T20) policy brief is a response to the call to recouple economic growth and social progress, at the dawn of a global infrastructure tsunami. It highlights the lack of a definitive model of urban, metropolitan sustainability and research on its impacts for global infrastructure and multilevel governance needs. It emphasizes that while infrastructures are forming a growingly boundless system, piecemeal approaches to developing urban sustainable agendas and projects are still prevailing, overlooking the systemic impacts of urbanization on biodiversity and ecosystem services, which are also boundless. The first paper of a series that is to be continued during the upcoming T20 Saudi Arabia, Italy, and India, complementing the T20 Japan policy brief Building Resilient Infrastructure Systems (Evans et al.), it advocates for a new generation of science-to-society and knowledge-to-policy connectivity to reposition infrastructure investments and value chains. In an era of rising resources limitations and urban growth, the paper outlines the underestimated role of research infrastructures in infrastructure for development policies and it proposes new priorities for a more comprehensive urban agenda within the G20, including biodiversity, with a specific focus on critical regions such as the Amazon and the Arctic.