Emergence and evolution of urbanization research: A 50-year scientometric analysis

Abstract

Urbanization has accelerated rapidly in recent decades, with nearly 70 % of the global population projected to live in cities by 2050. As urban areas confront growing challenges, including climate change, housing shortages, and informal growth, urban research has diversified in scope and intensified in focus. However, comprehensive assessments of the field remain limited. This study fills that gap through a scientometric analysis of 14,282 publications indexed in Scopus between 1970 and 2024. It examines three distinct phases of urbanization research (1970–1990, 1991–2010, and 2011–2024) and employs VOSviewer, CiteSpace, and Bibliometrix (RStudio) to map publication trends, thematic evolution, and collaboration networks. Results reveal an exponential growth in urban research output after 2010, reflecting a growing focus on smart cities alongside the rising urgency of climate-related challenges. Five dominant thematic clusters were identified, focusing on urban planning and governance, environmental challenges, sustainability, socio-spatial transformations, and technological innovation. The analysis also highlights the rise of new research frontiers such as smart urbanism, climate adaptation, and resilience, alongside persistent geographic disparities in the Global South. These findings deepen understanding of the intellectual evolution of urbanization research and provide insights to guide future scholarship and sustainable urban policy.

Keywords

Urbanization / Science mapping / Urban planning / Sustainable development / Urban policy

Declaration of competing interests

The author declares that he has no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Abdulaziz I. Almulhim: Writing – review & editing, Writing – original draft, Visualization, Methodology, Formal analysis, Data curation, Conceptualization, Investigation, Resources, Software, Validation.

Supplementary materials

Supplementary material associated with this article can be found, in the online version, at doi:10.1016/j.geosus.2026.100456.

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