Urbanization exposes insects to coupled changes in temperature, artificial light, habitat configuration, vegetation, resource distributions, disturbance, and biotic interactions. Yet urban occurrence is often treated as evidence of a coherent “urban-adapted” phenotype even when studies measure different biological levels and provide very different strengths of evolutionary inference. This systematic map organized peer-reviewed insect evidence published from 2017–2025 around urban environmental filters, behavioral traits, physiological traits, plasticity, evolutionary divergence, and persistence-related trait combinations. Publications were coded according to taxon, life stage, environmental exposure, biological level, study setting, response class, and inferential strength. Thirty-three individually verified publications constituted the mapped working evidence set. Source-specific database-export totals were not recoverable; consequently, unavailable upstream retrieval and deduplication counts are reported transparently as not recoverable rather than reconstructed. Evidence indicates substantial heterogeneity among taxa, cities, spatial scales, life stages, and measured outcomes. Urban warming can filter physiological tolerance and sometimes generate evolutionary divergence, but common-garden evidence also demonstrates plasticity without detectable urban evolutionary differentiation. Behavioral timing, foraging, and light responses can alter realized exposure, while local floral resources, habitat structure, microclimate, and lighting may explain responses that a simple urban–rural classification obscures. The mapped literature supports treating insect urbanization as conditional matching among environmental filters, trait states, response mechanisms, and biological consequences rather than as a universal syndrome. Strong claims of adaptation require evidence beyond urban association or phenotypic divergence, particularly where fitness, life-stage, geographic, and genomic validation remain limited.
