Advancing the current understanding and capability to predict atmospheric flow and related transport in urban areas is critical for many applications, including air quality modeling, urban climate, pedestrian comfort and structural resilience. Turbulence in these environments is rarely in equilibrium with the underlying surface and is typically characterized by strong departures from statistical stationarity. For example, the atmospheric boundary is often driven by a range of (sub)meso forcings that can evolve over sufficiently short time scales and result in unsteady flow conditions in cities. Yet, current theories describing mass, energy, and momentum transport in urban areas are largely established for equilibrium and statistically stationary flow. This presentation will provide an overview on the effects of a particular class of flow unsteadiness (flow pulsation) on the structure of mean flow and turbulence in urban areas. The discussion will focus on the impact of flow unsteadiness on flow statistics and on the geometry of coherent structures responsible for momentum and kinetic energy transport.