Urban governance: A review of intellectual structure and topic evolution

Abstract

As the world becomes increasingly urbanized, urban governance has attracted more academic attention. There have been some review articles on the state of urban governance research, as they are in the form of selected themes by the authors, it is difficult to gain a systematic understanding of the field.

This review article conducts bibliometrics and domain knowledge map analysis of 1280 papers on urban governance. It produces a comprehensive picture of the intellectual structure, the evolution and trends of the research topics on urban governance. The findings show scholars from three disciplines covering three subfields of urban governance: urbanity, publicity and technology. USA, UK and mainland China are the main contributors to urban governance research. University College London, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, University of Amsterdam, and the University of Sheffield are key players in international collaboration. However, the international research collaboration network is rather weak. There are nine highly researched topics: citizenship, urban monitoring and evaluation, global south development and challenges, urban mobility and sustainable development, institutional concept and challenge, technological change and governance transformation, metropolitan governance and innovation, urban politics and intergovernmental relations, and urban governance in China. Based on highlighted words in the research themes, urban governance research gradually moves from the connotation and theoretical basis to the subject and practice model of urban governance, and then to the influencing factors and evaluation of urban governance as well as the innovation and challenges of urban governance.