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Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Urban Governance
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/ugj

Urban governance: A review of intellectual structure and topic evolution

Kai Song a, Yue Chen a,∗, Yongbiao Duan b, Ye Zheng c
a
Wise Lab, Dalian University of Technology, Dalian, China
b
School of Public Policy and Administration, Xi’an Jiaotong University, Xi’an, China
c
School of Public Policy and Administration, Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi’an, China

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Keywords: As the world becomes increasingly urbanized, urban governance has attracted more academic attention. There
Urban governance have been some review articles on the state of urban governance research, as they are in the form of selected
Intellectual structure themes by the authors, it is difficult to gain a systematic understanding of the field.
Topic evolution
This review article conducts bibliometrics and domain knowledge map analysis of 1280 papers on urban gov-
Bibliometrics
ernance. It produces a comprehensive picture of the intellectual structure, the evolution and trends of the research
Metropolitan governance
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 in-
novation, 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.

1. Introduction
According to the United Nations report, more than 50% of the
world’s population now lives in cities (DESA, 2012). Cities have be-
come an important field of capital accumulation, political games, social
development, and global connection. In the context of worsening global
social-economic inequality, cities must deal with global issues such as
economic globalization, climate change, and urban expansion. There-
fore, cities are regarded as important global places for transformational
change (Baud et al., 2021). In addition, a large number of people, in-
dustries and production factors, etc. are gathered in cities, which brings
infinite possibilities for urban development. Cities are regarded as the
node of governance networks, resource flows, materials, and spaces,
and have become the core to solve future integrated problems related to
sustainable development. On the other hand, such aggregation and plu-
ralism also shape the complexity of urban governance (Revi et al., 2014).
As a way to guide transformation, urban governance can be
considered as a collection of different work arrangements including
formal and informal government actions, which together guide the
development of the cities (Hendriks, 2014). Some scholars have agreed
that urban governance is the key to solving a global problem, and also
proposed that "mayors rule the world", which shows the importance
of urban governance at present (Barber, 2013). Meanwhile, academic
attention to urban governance is growing rapidly, and the number of
related papers has increased year by year. These studies are mainly
focused on the connotation of urban governance, the composition of
urban governance bodies and models, etc. as well as urban governance
has gradually become a hot topic of current governance-related.
Urban governance is a relatively new and hot research field, and its
research lineage has gone through the following main stages: the tradi-
tional urban management stage before the 1950s, with the government
as the main body, mainly focused on urban infrastructure construction
and public service provision, with the aim of improving urban produc-
tivity and efficiency. The 1950s to 1980s belonged to the emergence
of urban governance research stage, scholars began to focus on the
interaction of government, market and society in urban governance,
and explored the theoretical framework, practical methods and policy
formulation of urban governance, and promoting the development of
urban political science (Huang, 2015). The growth machine theory
(Molotch, 1976) and other explanatory perspectives have had a wide

∗
Corresponding author at: Dalian City, Liaoning Province, 116024, China.
E-mail address: chenyuedlut@163.com (Y. Chen).

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ugj.2023.06.001
Received 7 December 2022; Received in revised form 18 April 2023; Accepted 19 June 2023
Available online xxx
2664-3286/© 2023 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. on behalf of Shanghai Jiao Tong University. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND
license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/)
Please cite this article as: K. Song, Y. Chen, Y. Duan et al., Urban governance: A review of intellectual structure and topic evolution, Urban
Governance, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ugj.2023.06.001
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Fig. 1. Framework for reviewing the urban governance literature.
impact. From the 1980s to the late 1990s, urban governance entered
the stage of urban governance transition, and urban governance began
to transform from the traditional government governance model to the
governance network model (Stoker, 1998), especially the rise of urban
neoliberalism, which advocates the adoption of private capital and
market mechanisms to more effectively (Brenner & Theodore, 2005).
Theories such as urban regime theory have had a significant impact
(Stone, 1993). Since the 21st century, urban governance has entered the
stage of multi-subject participation, emphasizing the participation and
cooperation of multiple subjects and more complex subject relations,
with social participation, urban democracy, social innovation, smart
city and sustainable development becoming major issues. Therefore,
the wide range of research on urban governance demonstrates the
complexity of the field and the need for a comprehensive perspective.
It should be noted that the existing literature review of urban gov-
ernance mostly adopts qualitative analysis such as summary or induc-
tion, which is highly dependent on the professional knowledge and cog-
nitive level of the scholars (Bolívar & Meijer, 2016; da et al., 2019;
Guimarães, 2021). These researchers have examined the urban gover-
nance literature from specific viewpoints (such as concept, value, or
application). However, about the knowledge bases of the research and
its focuses, cooperation patterns and so on, we don’t have an overall
picture.
This review explores a complete landscape of the academic research
on urban governance with intellectual structure and topics evolution
based on bibliometrics and knowledge mapping analysis of 1280 urban
governance papers retrieved in the Web of Science. Bibliometrics and
knowledge mapping based on research literature are effective methods
to show a comprehensive and systematic landscape in a research field
through data statistics and content analysis (Linnenluecke et al., 2019;
Beck & Storopoli, 2021). Such analysis will provide a useful supplement
to the empirical review of researchers. And it would be helpful to schol-
ars in finding a cooperative way to improve academic visualization and
thinking of interesting ideas from the evolution of the topics to grasp
the research directions. The detailed procedures are presented in Fig. 1.
2. Data source and methodology
The research content of urban governance covers a wide range and
is characterized by a considerable disconnection from actual concerns
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of urban managers, practitioners, and leaders (Nuno F. da Cruz et al.,
2019). Considering we are interested in the meta-science study of ur-
ban governance, the dataset of 1280 papers was assembled by searching
urban governance terms in Title and Keyword sections through search
engines of Thompson Reuters’s Web of Science, the details are shown in
Table 1. The research of urban governance has received increasing at-
tention from academia through the increasing related papers shown in
Fig. 2, and it roughly experienced three periods, emerging (1959-1996),
growing (1997-2012), and thriving (2013-2021).
Intellectual structure refers to a set of salient attributes of the knowl-
edge base that can provide an organized and holistic understanding of
the chosen scientific domain (Shafique, 2013), and which can be re-
flected by the structure of the disciplines based on journal co-occurrence
analysis (Wu et al., 2020), by the cooperation network based on the co-
authorship and co-word analysis (Mora et al., 2017; Zhao et al., 2019).
Topics evolution indicates how a topic is changing over time, includ-
ing importing new knowledge or concepts, as well as which topics are
gaining importance or dying out (Chen et al., 2017), and which can
be reflected by co-words clustering and important words highlighting.
For example, Li (2019) discussed the research frontiers of smart cities
through studying co-keywords and bibliographic coupling of literature.
In this study, co-occurrence analysis and cluster analysis are used to
evaluate the 1280 papers published in the WoS database from 1959 to
2021.
2.1. Co-occurrence in bibliometrics
The co-occurrence methodologies can be seen as constituting an an-
alytical framework that can be applied to any set of bibliographic items
and entities on any level of aggregation (Tijssen et al., 1994), e.g., co-
citation, co-word, and co-authorship. Co-occurrences are used to under-
stand the underlying patterns of the data set, which are always managed
through co-occurrences matrices. The co-occurrence matrix can be in-
terpreted as representing a network, with the elements as nodes and
the connections as links, where a number of techniques can be applied
to analyze the data (Buzydlowski, 2015). Moreover, time series of co-
occurrence data allow an analysis of the dynamics of a research field.
In this paper, we extract keywords, WoS categories, authors and insti-
tutions from 1280 papers to construct the corresponding co-occurrence
matrix.
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Table 1
Search strategy and data information.
Dataset Records Search strategy
#1 625 TI = (“urban governance∗ ” OR “urban manage∗ ” OR “city governance∗ ” OR “city manage∗ ” OR “town governance∗ ” OR “town manage∗ ” OR
“metropolitan governance∗ ” OR “metropolitan manage∗ ”)
#2 850 AK = (“urban governance∗ ” OR “urban manage∗ ” OR “city governance∗ ” OR “city manage∗ ” OR “town governance∗ ” OR “town manage∗ ” OR
“metropolitan governance∗ ” OR “metropolitan manage∗ ”)
#1 OR #2 1,280 Data source: Web of Science Core Collection
Note:Retrieval time:August 31th, 2021
Fig. 2. Increasing trend of the papers on urban governance published from 1959 to 2021.
2.1.1. Co-word analysis
Keywords allow the tracing of research themes from academic arti-
cles (Tang et al., 2021). Co-word analysis is a content analysis technique
that involves co-occurrence frequency of pairs of words or terms given
by authors or indexers (Cozzens et al., 1988), the co-word frequency
array is used to construct a co-word map that represents the intellectual
content of a field by means of cluster analysis and network analysis.
These word co-occurrences networks reflect the linkages among themes
in a research field. It has become the main method of knowledge map-
ping to reveal the hot research themes and evolution trends of a research
field (Jia et al., 2013).
2.1.2. Co-subject analysis
In the WoS core collection database, each article was labeled with
one or more subject categories to facilitate rapid search. The co-
occurrence analysis of subject categories along with the centrality anal-
ysis provides a means to examine the composition of major subject cat-
egories of a research field. The clustering analysis allows us to recog-
nize the major subject category distribution and its significance among
the clusters. In this paper, the Louvain method (Blondel et al., 2008)
for community detection is used to extract communities from the co-
occurrence network for WoS categories. With this approach, we can see
clearly the mutual intersection and dependence in different disciplines,
and the disciplinary composition and structural characteristics of the
scientific system can be shown.
2.1.3. Co-authorship analysis
Scientific collaboration networks are a hallmark of contemporary
academic research. (Fonseca et al., 2016) Researchers are no longer in-
dependent players, but members of teams that bring together comple-
mentary skills and multidisciplinary approaches around common goals.
Davidson Frame and Carpenter (1979) reflect that scientists working in
the core areas of research have higher international collaboration. We
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can identify important actors and their connections through the collab-
oration networks which are defined as the co-occurrence of different
institutes (Wu et al., 2020). Furthermore, the 2-mode network between
institute-level and topics of their interests can be constructed. Then we
can easily find various associated aspects of collaboration like types of
collaboration or similarities and differences between two or more insti-
tutes.
2.2. Clustering and visualization tool
Cluster analysis groups research objects based on information found
in data that describes the objects and their relationships. The goal is
that the objects within a group be similar to one another and different
from the objects in other groups. The greater the homogeneity within a
group and the greater the difference between groups, the better or more
distinct the clustering. In this research, several software tools like Gephi
(Bastian et al., 2009), Netdraw (Borgatti et al., 2002) and VoSviewer
(Van Eck and Waltman, 2009) are available to visualize the results of
the co-word analysis. Gephi and Netdraw can generate a network graph
representing the information about the relations among nodes can be a
very efficient way of describing a social structure. It can help us to better
understand how a node is connected to its "neighborhood" and its role
in the larger graph. VoSviewer is a software tool for constructing and
visualizing bibliometric networks developed by Van Eck and Waltman
of the CWTS Research Center of Leiden University in the Netherlands in
2010.
3. The intellectual structure of urban governance research
3.1. Disciplinary structure
Although "urban governance" is a clear concept, it has not been es-
tablished as a mature and unified research field, which is more like a
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"loose alliance" under a unified banner. 1280 urban governance papers
are distributed in 76 subject categories in WoS, mostly concentrated
in Urban Studies, Environmental Sciences, Geography, Environmental
Studies, and other disciplines, and a small number are published in dis-
ciplines such as Humanities, Multidisciplinary, Psychology, Political Sci-
ence and so on. Among them, "Regional & Urban Planning" and "Devel-
oping studies" are at the core of the intellectual structure map based on
the subject category co-occurrence (Fig. 3), "Urban Studies", "Environ-
mental Studies", "Geography" and "Economics" are the core supporting
disciplines, and there are three peripheral supporting discipline groups,
namely "Environmental Sciences", "Political Sciences" and "Information
Sciences". In terms of Environmental Science, it focuses more on "Green
& Sustainable Science & Technology" and "Public, Environmental & Oc-
cupational Health" (including "Social Sciences, Interdisciplinary". "Pub-
lic Administration" and "Society"), "Information Science & Library Sci-
ences" and "Computer science, information system" has become three
supporting discipline groups. This disciplinary intellectual structure re-
flects the three dimensions of urban governance research content: ur-
banism, publicity and technology.
Urbanism is an important concept in urban sociology, first intro-
duced by Louis Wirth in his 1938 article Urbanism as a Way of Life, and
he proposed that the city is a relatively large, dense, and permanent set-
tlement of heterogeneous individuals (Louis, 1938). Urbanism indicates
the unique character of the city as a gathering place for human life, i.e.,
the character of the city exists first and foremost as a counterpart of the
"non-city". The basic characteristics of the city must exist as some kind
of structural force, as the identity that truly shapes the basic function-
ing and overall appearance of the city (Wang, 2022). Thus, it’s a specific
social form formed in a certain area with the process of urbanization,
that is, the totality of particular interpersonal relationships, social psy-
chology, values and lifestyles. Cities bring together all these different
kinds of people, which can produce antagonism, chaos, but also creativ-
ity, new cultures, hybridity, mixity (Massey, 2000). At the same time,
cities assume important functions of state and social management, and
naturally become an important place for public discussion and political
communication (Yao, 2022). Grasping the essential properties of cities
and their governance laws is a prerequisite for enhancing the effective-
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Fig. 3. Disciplinary Structure mapping by sub-
ject categories co-occurrence network. Note:
The size of the circle denotes the frequency of
the node, the thickness of the line represents
the frequency of co-occurrence, and the color
of the node represents the group to which the
subject belongs.
ness of urban governance, which constitutes the knowledge source that
the development of the discipline for urban governance depends on. As
the complexity of urban governance is exacerbated by multicultural-
ism and diverse needs, it is important to accelerate the construction of
participatory governance systems and follow the laws of urban devel-
opment. We should reflect on the essence and attributes of the city in
urban governance practice and research.
Publicity is the orientation of urban governance, whose goal is to
maximize social benefits and social welfare, as well as to promote ra-
tional allocation and sharing of resources. Publicity includes political
economy, social, ecological, environmental and public health, etc. Pub-
lic urban space plays an important role as a stage for social Interaction
and political activity, Kohn M insists that “public spaces are charac-
terized by general accessibility, collective ownership, and a tendency
to foster interaction between individuals.” (Kohn, 2021) Therefore, the
publicity of urban becomes a key factor in urban renewal and gover-
nance.
Technicality is the means for good governance. Urban develop "regu-
latory governance" technology systems from the logic of "management",
while neglecting the intrinsic nature of "governance" and the pursuit
of "good governance", such as the development of various instrumen-
tal urban management technologies. On the one hand, the application
of information technology in urban governance has developed techni-
cality of urban governance. On the other hand, it has put forward new
requirements for the governance model and the participating subjects,
which means digitalization, intelligence and refinement become the new
paradigm of "digital governance" for urban governance. At the same
time, urban overall planning and detailed control planning are also very
professional and technical. It’s significant to attach importance to urban
planning and development strategies for cities to obtain a sustainable
competitive advantage.
3.2. Cooperation network structure
Urban governance research is a public research field with a territorial
dimension, and thus the cooperation network can reflect the knowledge
structure of the whole research field to some extent. This paper illus-
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Fig. 4. Co-authorship network on urban governance. Note: The size of the circle is directly proportional to the betweeness of the node, and the thickness of the line
represents the frequency of co-occurrence.

trates the characteristics of the cooperation patterns and geographical Table 2

distribution of urban governance research in terms of authors, research Highly produced organizations of urban governance research (top17).
institutions and universities, and countries/regions. Organizations Records % of 1280

(1) Co-authorship network 1 University College London (UCL) 29 2.266

2 Shanghai Jiao Tong University 24 1.875
A total of 1,280 papers were completed by 2,188 authors, of which 3 University of Amsterdam 23 1.797
1,770 authors were involved in the collaboration. Fig. 4a visualizes the 4 The University of Sheffield 20 1.563
collaborative patterns between these authors. The co-authorship net- 5 The University of Melbourne 19 1.484
6 Utrecht University 19 1.484
work has 1770 nodes and 2865 lines, its density is 0.0018. Fig. 4b 7 University of Toronto 16 1.25
presents the cooperation network of authors who have collaborated at 8 Erasmus University Rotterdam 13 1.016
least twice, including 94 nodes and 90 lines, with a network density of 9 University of Gothenburg 12 0.938
0.0206. The density of the two co-authorship networks is obviously dif- 10 University of the Witwatersrand 12 0.938
11 University of Birmingham 11 0.859
ferent, which indicates that many collaborations are only once and are
12 The University of Manchester 11 0.859
unstable relationships. There are more stable cooperative relationships 13 The University of Queensland 11 0.859
in fig. 4b, but the overall cooperative network is sparse and fragile, and 14 Arizona State University 10 0.781
no stable cooperative groups have been formed yet. 15 Florida State University 10 0.781
16 University of Cape Town 10 0.781
(2) Co-organization network 17 The University of Sydney 10 0.781
Total 260 20.31
A total of 1280 papers were produced by 1006 organizations, of
which 756 have participated in the cooperation. Table 2 lists the top
17 most productive organizations (number of publications >= 10) con-
tributing to the work on urban governance, all of them are universities. University Rotterdam, these institutions have a close cooperation re-
The total percentage of research results from these 17 universities is lationship. Shanghai Jiao Tong University has the highest number of
only 20.31% (Table 2), which means that the current research strength partners, followed by UCL.
of urban governance is fragmented. UCL, Shanghai Jiao Tong Univer- We would like to grasp where knowledge is produced in these uni-
sity, The University of Amsterdam, and The University of Sheffield are versities, thus we further counted the institutions that produced papers
the most active research institutions among them. in Table 3 (number of publications >= 6). In China, the China Institute
Fig. 5 visualizes the collaborative patterns between 756 organiza- for Urban Governance (CIUG) and the School of International and Pub-
tions with 1263 collaborative connections. Each node represents an or- lic Affairs (SIPA) both are important hubs of expertise that facilitate the
ganization, and its size represents the number of papers it has produced research on urban governance. The Bartlett School of Planning is one
related to urban governance. The connections in co-organization net- of the UK’s major centers for research into the built environment and
work represent the cooperation among organizations; the wider the line, planning, and one of the leaders internationally in the field. The African
the stronger the cooperation. We can find that UCL, Shanghai Jiao Tong Centre for Cities at UCT promotes vibrant, democratic and sustainable
University and The University of Sheffield hold the core position. Such urban development in the global South from an African perspective. Fac-
as The University of Sydney and University of Wollongong, Shanghai ulty of Architecture, Building & Planning at Melbourne, the Amsterdam
Jiao Tong University and Tongji University, Fudan University and Delft Institute for Social Science Research (AISSR), Department of Urban Stud-
University of Technology, Delft University of Technology and Erasmus ies and Planning at MIT, etc. are explicit centers of urban governance

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Fig. 5. The Maximum connected graph of co-organization network (frequency of collaboration >1).

Table 3
Highly produced institutions of urban governance research (top11).

Organizations Country Records

1 China Institute for Urban Governance (Shanghai Jiao Tong University) China 19
2 Fac architecture bldg & Planning (The University of Melbourne) Australia 9
3 School of International and Public Affairs (Shanghai Jiao Tong University) China 9
4 Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research (University of Amsterdam) Netherlands 8
5 The Bartlett School of Planning (University College London) The UK 8
6 African Centre for Cities (University of Cape Town) South Africa 7
7 Faculty of Geosciences (Utrecht University) Netherlands 7
8 School of Architecture and Planning (University of the Witwatersrand) South Africa 6
9 CUNY Graduate Center America 6
10 Department of Urban Studies and Planning (MIT) America 6
11 Department of Urban Studies and Planning (The University of Sheffield) The UK 6
Total 91

that have explicit research missions. Fig. 6 visualizes the collaborative
patterns between 70 institutions with 63 collaborative connections, in
which we can find that China Institute for Urban Governance, Center for
the Analysis of Social-Ecological Landscapes and Faculty of Engineering
have stronger have a stronger tendency to collaborate with other insti-
tutions, as well as they are located in the core position.
We map the top ten research institutions in Table 2 to a two-mode
network of research topics-institution on urban governance. The two-
mode network is shown in Fig. 7, we can observe many universities and
research institutes focus on multiple topics of urban governance. There
are significant differences in research focus and direction and each re-
search institution has its own distinctive research characteristics. The
following specific observations can be made: (1) the main research top-
ics of UCL are urban policy, smart cities, infrastructure, urban manage-
ment, knowledge production and London, and it has conducted collab-
oration with The University of Sheffield, Western Sydney University,
China University of Mining and Technology, RMIT University et al. (2)
social trust, public-private partnerships and urbanization are discussed
in Shanghai Jiao Tong University which collaborated with Tongji Uni-
versity and Shanghai University of Finance and Economics. (3) Univer-
sity of Amsterdam unfolds studies related to urban planning, climate
change adaptation and India, and cooperated with Indian School of Busi-
ness and other institutions on the node (India). We conclude that the
current research about urban governance has focused on urban policy,
urban management, smart cities, climate change in Fig. 5, and effective
collaboration between different institutions to promote a globalized ur-
ban governance system. However, the themes among existing urban gov-
ernance research institutions are still very limited, it displays features
such as marginalization, and institutional collaboration is insufficient.
(3) co-nation/region network
Table 4 shows the cooperation-related indicators for the top 15 most
productive countries and regions. The United States and the United
Kingdom have been the most active and influential in urban governance
research. South Africa, Spain, Scotland and China(mainland) prefer co-
operation, and Sweden, Canada, India and USA are more inner coop-

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Fig. 6. The Maximum connected graph of co-institution network (frequency of collaboration >1). Note that the name of institutions may not be fully displayed in
Fig. 6.
Fig. 7. " Research Topics - Institution" Bimodal Network Diagram (top10 in Table 2, threshold:2). Note: The squares represent institutions, and the circles represent
research topics.
eration in this field. Furthermore, Fig. 9 shows the co-authorship map
for the top 15 most productive countries and regions in relation to the
research on urban governance. we also observe USA produces the most
research on discussing urban governance issues and its collaborative
network covers almost all the countries/regions in the map, and it has
particularly strong ties China. Most countries have a preference for do-
mestic collaboration, e.g., approximately 80% in the USA, 74% in China,
and 56% in the England.
To further explore the important role of countries and regions in the
collaboration relationship, we draw the co-nation/region network for
all 37 countries and regions concerning the research on urban gover-
nance (Fig. 8). We adopt the K-core analysis of the network and could
find that the country located at the core of the collaborative network
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is England, which also has the highest betweenness centrality. It indi-
cates that England occupies an important position in the field of urban
governance research and plays an important role in connecting. In ad-
dition, countries such as Netherlands, USA, Australia, Germany, France
and Luxembourg are also at the core of the network. In contrast, China
is marginalized in the network compared to the countries that produce
the most research. China and Korea, USA and Malawi have stronger co-
operation. It has particularly strong ties between China and Korea, USA
and Malawi.
Compared with the skew distribution of the number of co-authors in
other fields, according to Fig. 10, the number of papers with indepen-
dent authors was 588 (46% of all data), so the distribution of the number
of co-authors on urban governance shows a power-law distribution.
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Table 4
Cooperation of active countries in urban governance research.

No. Nation Record Citation H-index Co-authorship Inner co-authorship Betweeness

(%) (%)

1 USA 254 4846 38 20.08% 33.07% 0.9495

2 UK 182 5236 33 35.16% 20.33% 1.2865
3 Netherlands 89 1616 24 41.57% 19.10% 1.1048
4 China (mainland) 88 931 18 50.00% 23.26% 1.0041
5 Australia 86 1267 20 33.77% 28.57% 1.1635
6 Germany 77 1245 20 27.14% 14.29% 1.0166
7 Canada 70 1212 22 33.96% 35.85% 1.0152
8 Spain 53 692 13 56.82% 22.73% 0.9363
9 France 44 653 15 36.59% 39.02% 0.762
10 Italy 41 269 10 35.14% 27.03% 1.0225
11 Sweden 37 1139 17 41.18% 47.06% 1.4453
12 Brazil 34 206 7 45.16% 22.58% 0.463
13 Scotland 31 798 12 51.61% 29.03% 1.0771
14 South Africa 31 395 12 59.09% 9.09% 1.0298
15 India 22 270 8 20.08% 33.07% 0.7367

Fig. 8. Collaboration map by co-nation/region analysis ( co-authorship frequency > 1, node:67 countries, link: 974 ties).

In conclusion, the studies of urban governance are unevenly dis-
tributed globally. In terms of the number of publications, we found that
the key contributors to the research on urban governance issues were
developed countries such as the USA, UK, Australia, and Netherlands.
In comparison, China, India, and a few developing countries contribute
to this research area. Secondly, the UK plays an important role in the
research on urban governance, with a certain leadership for research
topics and an indispensable role as a bridge for international collabo-
ration. Finally, according to the type of cooperation, we observe a lot
of authors have a preference for domestic collaboration, and there is no
obvious grouping in the international collaboration network. The pro-
portion of one author achieves almost 50%. On one hand, there is not a
strong demand for international collaboration in the field of urban gov-
ernance. On the one hand, stable collaborative relationships have not
been formed until now.
4. Topics dynamics evolution
We map the topic evolution of urban governance research by us-
ing the visualization software VOSviewer. Fig. 11 presents intuitively
the evolution of nine research themes in urban governance by time se-
ries of highlight terms on urban governance. These nine themes are (1)
citizenship as a core element, (2) urban monitoring and evaluation, (3)
development and challenges in the global South. (4) urban mobility and
sustainable development, (5) institutional concepts and challenges, (6)
technological change and governance transformation. (7) metropolitan
governance and innovation, (8) urban politics and intergovernmental
relations, and (9) urban governance in China.
4.1. Citizenship as the core element of urban governance
According to the distribution and frequency of highlight terms, this
paper summarizes the development trajectory of urban governance re-
search. The first theme of urban governance research focuses on the
core elements of urban development such as citizenship. The hot key-
words include immigration, economic development, urban develop-
ment, London, citizen participation, urban resilience, urban design, spa-
tial planning, urban politics, etc. It reflects that the core elements of
urban development are constantly enriched with the deepening of ur-
ban governance research. There are many factors influencing urban
governance, including urban institutions, governance structures, pol-
icy systems, resource elements, spatial planning, economic levels, cul-
tural environments and participatory empowerment, which together
determine the level of urban governance and urban sustainable de-
velopment capacity. The addition of new elements such as immigra-
tion, public participation, accountability, urban design, urban resilience,

8
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K. Song, Y. Chen, Y. Duan et al. Urban Governance xxx (xxxx) xxx

Fig. 9. Co-authorship map for key countries

and regions in relation to the research on ur-
ban governance.

Fig. 10. The power-law distribution of the

number of co-authors.

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Fig. 11. Topics evolution mapping by time series of highlight terms on urban governance.
etc., makes the content and form involved in urban governance more
complex.
Specifically, the proliferation of sublet spaces in informal settlements
around cities and the complex patterns of centralization within cities
caused by migration have important implications for the structure of
urban economies and labor markets, which in turn contribute to urban
development and cultural shaping (Arapoglou, 2016). At the same time,
the issues of civic participation and urban governance brought about
by migration have become troubling. Urban governance as a concept
of urban territorial spatial governance reflects the concern for sustain-
able urban development in the world in the context of globalization.
But as far as its connotation is concerned a mature and unified concept
has not yet been formed in the academic community (Davies, 2014),
and the theory of urban governance and the empirical studies involved
have undergone a significant shift (McQuarrie & Marwell, 2009). The
essence of governance evolved around political issues such as inequality
of rights, democratization, and public participation. With the advance-
ment of national reforms and changes in governance structures, the so-
cial objectives of governance have become broader and more challeng-
ing, and so has urban governance, with the shift from government-led
to multiple-governance becoming a clear trend in the way cities operate
(Koch, 2012).
Urban governance is an interactive process between government and
social actors, public sector and private institutions, which promotes the
economic and social development and competitiveness of cities through
mutual coordination of conflicting interests within government, be-
tween government and NGOs, between government and market, and
between government and people (Pierre, 1999), making citizen partic-
ipation in urban development a hot topic. Some scholars have studied
citizen participation in smart city projects using London as a case study,
suggesting that the potential level of citizen participation and the way of
stakeholder representation differ in smart city projects (Willems et al.,
2016). Meanwhile, the continued privatization of urban services, in-
frastructure provision and operations has increased the complexity of
urban management (Harvey, 2007), especially in the context of rapid
urban expansion and metropolitan consolidation, urban strategic plan-
ning and accountability mechanisms are becoming increasingly difficult
(Angel, 2017), and new concepts such as urban resilience have been pro-
posed to provide new development paths for urban governance. For ex-
ample, some scholars have proposed that urban resilience is the first step
toward the city of the future (VLAD, 2019). Urban management, policy
design, integrated urban system and risk management are increasingly
using the new concept of resilience. In a comprehensive view, urban
resilience building has become an important core element in urban gov-
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ernance at this stage, and new requirements have been put forward for
comprehensive urban upgrading.
4.2. Urban monitoring and comprehensive evaluation
The second theme focuses on urban monitoring and comprehensive
evaluation, with hot keywords and mutations including monitoring, reg-
ulation, GIS, Canada, urban sustainability, resilience, implementation,
and local governance, public policy, institutional capacity, and so on,
covering urban policy implementation and regulation, sustainability,
risk response capacity, transformative capacity and urban resilience.
Some scholars propose to monitor the spatial and structural characteris-
tics of cities through geographic information systems to obtain dynamic
indicators of urban environmental quality, provide information for ur-
ban governance in planning and decision-making, and then carry out
scenario analysis and task optimization (Fedra, 1999). Urban agricul-
ture is an important tool for urban renewal and promoting urban social
innovation (Sanyé-Mengual et al., 2019). By monitoring the impact of
urban agriculture on sustainable urban behavior, we provide a com-
prehensive and systematic assessment of urban agriculture benefits and
potential externalities to support the achievement of sustainable devel-
opment goals and good ecosystem services (Tapia et al., 2021). The mon-
itoring and prevention and control of risks and hazards within the city
is an important measure to ensure the smooth operation of the city and
enhance the modernization of urban governance. By setting up a mon-
itoring and early warning system and monitoring the full range of in-
formation on urban road traffic, hydrology and land space in real-time,
we ensure that the local government can quickly start emergency plans
and provide short message services to the public (Liu et al., 2015).
The evaluation of urban governance is mainly studied in terms of
urban governance capacity and governance level, and urban gover-
nance capacity is a comprehensive measure of the effectiveness of a
city’s governance, so scholars evaluate a certain area of urban gover-
nance from both comprehensive and local aspects. For example, Peo-
ple’s Forum Assessment Center (2015) conducts a comprehensive eval-
uation of urban governance capacity from four dimensions: basic guar-
antee capacity, macro regulation and control capacity, financial ca-
pacity, and grassroots self-governance capacity. Some scholars eval-
uate a certain capability of urban governance from a local perspec-
tive, such as Castelnovo et al. (2016), who evaluate the performance
of smart city governance through five dimensions, including commu-
nity building and management, vision and strategy formulation, public
value generation, asset management, and economic and financial sus-
tainability. Shen et al. (2018), based on the overall performance level
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of smart cities in China. proposing to analyze smart city performance
in five dimensions: smart infrastructure, governance, people, economy,
and environment. Zhang et al. (2021) evaluated the performance of
urban environmental governance in Anhui Province based on spatial
and temporal differences using a "pressure-state-response" model with
panel and spatial data. For studies on the level of urban governance,
the World Bank (1989) evaluated the level of governance in six di-
mensions: voice and accountability, political instability and violence,
government efficiency, regulatory burden, rule of law, and corruption;
Guo and Cheng (2010) evaluated the level of urban governance in seven
dimensions: participation, justice, effectiveness, control, rule of law,
transparency, and integrity. In conclusion, a rich dimension of urban
governance evaluation indicators has been formed in the academic com-
munity, but it is also continuously improved with the development of
new models such as smart cities and resilient cities.
4.3. Global South development and challenges
Global South development and challenges are the third theme fo-
cused in urban governance research, and the hot keywords and mu-
tation words mainly include urban poverty, citizenship, cities, Global
South, and race, informal economy, sustainable development, risk, pub-
lic space, democracy, etc., indicating that cities in the Global South face
major challenges in current urban governance, such as economic de-
velopment, democracy and risk control, which have become hot topics
of widespread interest to scholars worldwide. The Global South, as a
unique geopolitical entity, is shaping a heterogeneous expression across
territories in terms of geography and socio-technology in the process
of urbanization, opening up new spaces for cities in the Global South
and thus providing governance experiences for the continuation of co-
development among post-colonial cities. Global cities in the north and
south are experiencing many of the same challenges as cities in the
north, including climate change, growing inequality and middle clas-
sization, increasing health problems and aging.
However, cities in the Global South also face some additional chal-
lenges, such as the existence of large informal settlements like slums,
making urban poverty one of the hotter topics of interest in urban gov-
ernance in the Global South. Some scholars have explored urban citi-
zenship and urban poverty, suggesting that the concentration of urban
poverty poses a variety of policy and governance challenges, that unem-
ployment and the spread of capital have left many urban neighborhoods
in ruins, that fear of the culture of the poor and family life drives a vari-
ety of responses (Stern, 1997), and that the differences among citizens
in cities make them machines of racialized space (Mahmood, 1997). At
the same time, the Global South faces wide variations in infrastructure
development, urban spatial design, institutional functioning, and popu-
lation density in the process of urbanization, and issues such as massive
urban expansion and urbanization of rural areas have combined to push
urban governance to the forefront of research. At this stage, in reaffirm-
ing the global crisis of climate change, people are turning to the Global
South as a goal for a more sustainable orientation towards the globe
(Simone, 2020). Thus, research around urban green spaces in the Global
South is more extensive. Research shows that urban green spaces are all
essential elements of sustainable, healthy and livable cities, but due to
socioeconomic and racial disparities, marginalized populations such as
low-income and racial minorities (e.g., Black and Latino) in cities in the
Global North experience inequities in the quantity as well as quality of
urban green spaces (Wolch et al., 2014). Cities in the Global South are
similar to cities in the Global North in terms of quantity and quality of
urban green spaces, but also face inequities in urban also face inequities
in the proximity of green space (Rigolon et al., 2018).
4.4. Urban mobility and sustainable development
The fourth hot topic evolution of urban governance research is man-
ifested in urban mobility and sustainable development. Hot keywords
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and mutations mainly include globalisation, South Africa, planning, gov-
ernance, Spain, mobility, and regional governance, social movements,
spatial equity, urban competitiveness, social inclusion, etc., highlight-
ing the greater attention to urban mobility and governance hierarchies
in existing studies, showing consistency with the development trajec-
tory of urban governance in reality. Migration in the process of glob-
alization has changed the traditional urban form and enriched the cul-
tural diversity of cities (Syrett & Sepulveda, 2012). Economic, cultural
and geographic differences have a significant impact on urban mobility,
and the role of urban transport may be even more significant. Spanish
metropolitan mobility has received extensive attention in existing stud-
ies, mainly due to the fact that about 80.8% of the Spanish population
lives in large cities, and that Spain has invested the most in new infras-
tructure in the last 20 to 30 years compared to other European countries,
with a particular focus on metro networks in metropolitan areas. With
the trend towards sustainable development in recent years, Spain has
increasingly encouraged the creation of new services such as car shar-
ing, micro-mobility and electric vehicles, and the government has facil-
itated new forms of urban mobility through the continued promotion
of public-private partnership-based projects for electric and connected
vehicle recovery and economic transformation strategies, the creation
of a well-developed public transportation system and convenient and
low-consumption.
Urban sustainability is also a hot issue in global urban development,
with regional synergistic sustainable development becoming the trend.
Under the multiple squeezes of the new crown pneumonia epidemic,
global warming, and great power games, various national regions are
accelerating toward regional association to abate the negative effects
of de-globalization, and regionalization seems to increasingly become a
new form of globalization. The relative increase in innovation and con-
nectivity of Asian cities has accelerated their rise. In a situation where
uncertainties and medium-term and long-term challenges to global ur-
ban recovery are increasing and development is facing more uncertain-
ties, sustainability issues such as water supply, infrastructure, and pub-
lic service provision are magnified in urban governance and often take
on a more complex character (Smith & Wiek, 2012). As a result, ur-
ban sustainability is a recognized challenge for city governments to-
day, and cities have enacted multiple programs to mitigate other is-
sues such as climate change (Van Der Heijden et al., 2018; Shane &
Graedel, 2000). Urban sustainability governance is an institutional guid-
ing philosophy based on the joint efforts of government, administra-
tion, science, people, business, and society, and urban sustainability
governance can address urban vitality issues comprehensively from a
long-term perspective. It is also stated that governmental sustainabil-
ity governance should enable cities to cope with various complex issues
through intersectoral coordination. Some scholars have explored urban
governance research based on the centrality of political institutions and
the importance of forms of governance (John, 2001, Pierre, 2011). It
is proposed that urban governance is the cause and result of different
forms of interaction between social actors and the government, summa-
rizing the state-centered institutional control model and the broad net-
work governance model (Torfing et al., 2012), and then proposing that
urban governance lies in the participation of government, enterprises,
social actors, and other joint cooperation through many ways, such as
the integration of resource elements, in order to seek sustainable urban
development.
4.5. Institutional concept and challenge
The fifth theme focused in urban governance research is institu-
tional concept and challenge, and the hot keywords and mutation words
mainly include Europe, neoliberalism, informality, COVID-19, and ur-
banization, infrastructure, environmental governance, technology, ur-
ban political economy, digital platforms and so on. Among them, ne-
oliberalism emphasizes the leading role of the market, i.e., the introduc-
tion of "marketization", "liberalization", and "privatization" policy tools
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in urban governance. Since the late 1970s, neoliberalism has had a sig-
nificant impact on urban governance theory and practice, and has pro-
posed neoliberal urbanism, which advocates the optimal mechanism of
"open" markets in urban economic and social development (Bridge &
Watson, 2011), and thus influences urban planning, policy mechanisms
and socio-spatial transformation. However, some scholars have recog-
nized the problems of privatization of urban space and intensification of
social conflicts brought about by neoliberalism. Neoliberalism political
ideology has had an important impact on urban culture and institutional
concepts. For example, the prevalence of neoliberalism in Europe and
other countries has to some extent exacerbated the spread of COVID-
19 and the complexity of urban governance. The current development
concept of global cities should shift from "neoliberalism globalization"
to "inclusive globalization". In the context of neoliberalism globaliza-
tion, the global city is defined as a city that controls and manages a
global capital network, which is more often presented as a core-edge
or a single network of connected structures. Inclusive globalization, on
the other hand, advocates a more inclusive value concept, and global
cities are more dynamic cities in the globalized division of labor and
exchange, and more networked and synergistic structures.
The recent climate crisis and the new epidemic have triggered a pro-
found reflection on the relationship between human beings and nature,
and the emergence of such major global crises also poses a challenge
to current urban governance. The challenges posed by climate change
are increasingly being addressed by cities (Hunt & Watkiss, 2011;
Wejs, 2014). Bulkeley et al. have shown that climate change is con-
tributing to the degradation of urban environments, and that these is-
sues must be addressed in urban planning and governance (Bulkeley &
Betsill, 2013; Klein et al., 2017). The environmental degradation caused
by human activities such as climate change and biodiversity loss has
made urban governance face this challenge of providing safety and se-
curity, adequate living space, and good infrastructure provision with
limited resources (Boyd & Juhola, 2015). In terms of the impact of the
covid-19 on urban governance, cities are one of the core subjects af-
fected by the covid-19 crisis in terms of transmission, impact and re-
covery (Connolly et al., 2020; Nathan, 2021). The "forced experiments"
caused by the covid-19 have undermined the institutional system of ur-
ban governance and urban governance practices (Larcom et al., 2017).
In terms of current theoretical research on the challenges facing ur-
ban governance, there is a lack of extensive data to support elements
such as institutional change in the field of urban governance, and the
appropriate method of collecting data is a key limitation in the field. At
the same time, collecting and analyzing data on urban governance and
obtaining information on actual governance practices is complicated by
the differences in the cultural and legal contexts in which cities are lo-
cated. In addition, the broad scope of urban governance and the vague
definitions of urban governance limit the systematic and comparative
analysis of it. Although there are also many current case studies on ur-
ban policy and governance innovation, the proposed relevant theoretical
frameworks are limited and challenging to shift to a unified theory of
urban governance.
4.6. Technological change and governance transformation
The sixth theme of urban governance research hotspots can be sum-
marized as technological change and governance transformation, and
the hot keywords and mutation words mainly include place marketing,
city management, smart city, smart city governance, and urban trans-
formation, multilevel governance, urban entrepreneurialism, municipal
reform, etc., which promote the change of urban governance structure
and governance system, and also put forward new requirements for ur-
ban governance capacity.
The diffusion and spread of information technology, such as artificial
intelligence, has largely contributed to social development (Yigitcanlar
& Cugurullo, 2020) and has important implications for the transforma-
tion of urban governance to intelligence and the innovation of govern-
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mental governance techniques. However, some scholars argue that AI is
one of the most disruptive technologies of our time (Yigitcanlar et al.,
2020) and has brought negative impacts on urban governance in many
ways. Desouza et al. show that while AI has many benefits, it also makes
cities more vulnerable and puts pressure on local governments to main-
tain their existing social contracts in the face of increased unemploy-
ment and shifts in public finances (Desouza & Selby, 2019). In addition,
the rapid spread of false news information through Internet technol-
ogy and the fact that it can attract as much social attention as genuine
news information, these information technology-based disinformation
spreads rapidly poses a challenge to urban governance (Hunt, 2016).
These challenges have prompted governments to break away from tra-
ditional means and perceptions in urban governance and to promote the
transformation of urban government institutions from management to
governance. For example, by emphasizing the "people’s main role in the
city," the Chinese government has been able to mobilize people’s ini-
tiative and creativity in the process of urban governance, and to create
a "people’s city" in order to realize a city of to achieve "collaboration,
"participation," and "common interests" of the city.
In order to meet the various challenges in modern cities, cities
need smarter technology, collaboration, institutions, etc. Smart cities
have emerged and spread rapidly around the world, becoming a strate-
gic choice to promote global urbanization, improve urban governance,
solve the big city disease, improve the quality of public services, and
develop the digital economy, urban planning, urban economic develop-
ment, information and communication technology, health, etc. are all
applied to the study of smart cities or in practice. Meanwhile, academic
research and official documents have explained a lot around the def-
inition, dimensions, evaluation indicators and promotion initiatives of
smart cities (Albino et al., 2015). In essence, smart cities mainly refer
to the use of various information technologies or innovations to connect
and integrate the city’s systems and services in order to improve the ef-
ficiency of resource utilization, optimize city management and services,
and improve the quality of life of citizens. The goal of smart cities is more
open governance and optimization of governance effects (Meijer and Bo-
livar, 2016). Smart economy, smart governance, smart life, smart peo-
ple, smart environment and smart mobility, which are related to smart
cities, are also repeatedly mentioned. Research on smart city governance
has mainly benefited from previous research on e-government and is
based on a complex theory of socio-technical change (Yigitcanlar et al.,
2018). Smart city governance emphasizes the use of smart technologies
to create new forms of collaboration for better outcomes or a more open
governance process. Smart city governance is not a technological prob-
lem, but a complex process of institutional change and a new governance
model built on information technology.
4.7. Metropolitan governance and innovation
The seventh theme of urban governance research focuses on
metropolitan governance and urban governance model innovation, with
the main keywords including metropolitan government, local govern-
ment, city managers, Chile and land use, network governance, commu-
nity participation, urban citizenship, and metropolitan management. It
reflects that with the rapid development of cities, the academic com-
munity has been paying more attention to the metropolitan governance
of megacities, and scientific, refinement and intelligence have become
the common goals pursued by international metropolises. Metropoli-
tan governance originated from the theories related to regionalism in
the 1950s, and new perspectives such as metropolitan areas and urban-
rural relations have jointly contributed to the formation of metropoli-
tan governance. With the acceleration of globalization and urbanization
after 1990, modern governance theories represented by "new regional-
ism" emerged, and the research perspective of metropolitan governance
shifted from cities to urban agglomerations and regional issues, and its
connotation, paths and systems were further improved and began to fo-
cus on the theorization of existing practices. With the introduction of
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smart cities and other concepts, urban governance has gradually bro-
ken through the traditional "spatial planning" mindset and focused on
the inner operation mechanism and laws of cities, deepening urban gov-
ernance theory and policy system, spatial control and implementation,
urban renewal and grassroots governance practices.
The study of urban governance practice models has received exten-
sive attention from academics, and the global urban governance models
vary greatly due to the cultural and institutional backgrounds of cities,
and the competition among cities has led to continuous learning and in-
novation. With the continued privatization of urban services and infras-
tructure provision and operation, urban governance forms such as pri-
vate sector participation in governance, citizen participation in gover-
nance, pluralistic governance, and networked governance are gradually
enriched. As a result, more and more scholars have begun to study urban
governance models. In western countries, there are four main models
of urban governance: managerial, corporatist, progrowth, and welfare
governance models of urban governance. Among them, the managerial
governance model takes the government as the main body of urban gov-
ernance and emphasizes on enhancing the efficiency of public services.
The corporatist governance model divides the main bodies of urban gov-
ernance into different interest groups, and the associations participate in
the process of urban governance based on interests. The progrowth gov-
ernance model aims at stimulating urban economic growth in the pro-
cess of urban governance, and is a common governance model adopted
by emerging cities. The welfare governance model is only reflected in
a few countries with a strong economic base, where state investment is
the main instrument of urban governance to ensure high welfare for ur-
ban residents (Pierre, 1999). The "urban partnership governance model"
proposed by Ingemar is defined as "a coalition of interests that develops
and oversees a common strategy for the reorganization of a specific re-
gion". Since the 1990s, urban governments have faced a trend toward
decentralization and more diverse forms of government, and thus part-
nership has increasingly been used as a governance model for urban
governments to solve the problems they face (Elander, 2002). Ansell and
Gash (2008) propose that "collaborative governance" is defined as a
dominant arrangement that requires the participation of one or more
public institutions and nongovernmental agents in the process of col-
lective decision making for the purpose of achieving public policy and
managing public projects and property. The study of urban governance
models theoretically summarizes various forms of public-private part-
nerships and integrates multidisciplinary fields such as management,
political science, and geography, opening up the scope of multidisci-
plinary cross-sectional research (Rode, 2018). At the same time, it has
proven that modern forms of governance can be achieved in differ-
ent political cultures (highly centralized or polycentric polities), which
has certain implications for the behavior of multiple subjects and the
formulation of government public policies (Stoker, 2011). However,
with the expansion of actors and diversity in urban governance de-
cisions, governance hierarchy integration and governance complexity
increase.
4.8. Urban politics and intergovernmental relations
The eighth theme focuses on urban politics and intergovernmental
relations, with hot keywords including metropolitan regions, decentral-
ization, city manager, mayors, politics, Australia, climate change mit-
igation, and leadership, sustainable urban development, equity, inter-
governmental relations, and corruption, illustrating the importance of
urban civilization and political development for urban governance prac-
tices and governance modernization, and urban spatial politics and so-
cial contradictions exacerbate urban social movements and local con-
flicts, which in turn have a certain impact on urban democracy and so-
cial equality and contribute to the direction of repoliticization of urban
governance.
Political leadership and community participation can facilitate
the development of legitimate and effective policies, providing top-
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level design and policy systems for urban governance (Haus & Er-
ling Klausen, 2011). Some scholars suggest that responsiveness, effec-
tiveness, procedural justice, resilience, and counterbalance are the five
core values of good urban governance, which have become the core
values of good urban governance by improving the openness of urban
governance and the rapport of citizens, and promoting democracy and
rule of law (Hendriks, 2014). The plurality of governance subjects also
provides new ideas for adapting urban governance to market-oriented
reforms and promoting political and democratic participation. With the
in-depth exploration of democracy, participation, administration and in-
stitutions in urban governance, the subjects of urban governance have
undergone a significant transformation. Under the traditional frame-
work of urban governance research with government as the main fo-
cus, current research has gradually begun to focus on the important
role of the market and civil society (Parés et al., 2012), especially the
study of public participation under the awakening of civic conscious-
ness, and concentrated on the definition of public interest and the ways
to achieve public participation, and continues to realize the "pluralism"
of urban governance subjects. However, the disconnection between ur-
ban governance research and practice is gradually emerging, with cit-
izen participation, institutional weaknesses and capacity issues under
the participation of civil society organizations, privatization and effi-
ciency becoming areas of concern in urban governance. At the same
time, city managers play an important role in urban governance, mak-
ing the cost of governance and quality of service a key concern. Studies
have found that management costs are not reduced in contract markets
where competition is lacking, and city managers recognize the impor-
tance of enhancing competition between public and private delivery by
creating mixed markets (Warner & Hefetz, 2008), which in turn reduces
government costs while improving service quality (Warner, 2012).
Intergovernmental relations in the perspective of urban governance
include both central and local governmental relations within countries
and intergovernmental relations between countries. On the one hand,
"urban asymmetry" makes the responsiveness of different levels of gov-
ernment in urban governance vary greatly, and the level of economic
development and resource factor endowment influence the initiatives
of urban governance, while innovation becomes the most active part of
inter-city relations in the context of globalization. Local governments
share knowledge through learning interaction, institutional adaptation,
and knowledge creation. Cities have become the focus of innovation
as they compete with each other to promote each other. On the other
hand, governmental cooperation between countries in the field of urban
governance is increasing, especially in the areas of climate change miti-
gation, response to public health events, education, and transportation.
The EU, for example, is increasingly negotiating intergovernmental re-
lations in urban governance, and tensions between urban capacities and
resources, as well as various institutional deficiencies in central govern-
ment, have led to direct engagement of EU institutions and sub-national
structures with each other. In addition to EU sponsored projects and ini-
tiatives, cities are increasingly involved in international networks (Nuno
F. da Cruz et al., 2019).
4.9. Urban governance in developing countries and in China
The ninth theme of urban governance research focuses on urban
planning in developing countries and urban governance in China. The
hot keywords and mutations include development countries, urban plan-
ning, China, city region, Shanghai and pearl river delta, experimen-
tal governance, Guangzhou, accessibility, scale, green space, etc., in-
dicating that developing countries recognize the important role of ur-
ban planning in urban governance, while urban planning in developed
countries has been relatively mature. Through the analysis of different
urban governance models, governance systems and governance capa-
bilities, we provide urban governance experiences and inspirations for
other countries in the world. At the same time, the study of urban gov-
ernance in China has received extensive attention from the academic
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community, and the governance of megacities such as Shanghai and
Guangzhou has become the focus. This phenomenon should be related
to the fact that China is experiencing the largest and very rapid urban-
ization in human history, and that cities in general have high residential
density, which poses a very big challenge to urban governance. The Chi-
nese government also attaches great importance to urban work and ac-
tively relies on universities, research institutes and other research bases
or think tanks to conduct cross-cutting research around issues related to
urban governance.
Specifically, urban planning is a complex system that includes plan-
ning, management and regulation within metropolitan areas, cities,
urban-rural areas, towns and cities, etc. It involves spatial boundary de-
lineation, resource allocation, political and social development through
governments of different scales governing organizational, social and
economic relationships in space. Thus, urban governance issues are
more concerned with urban renewal and regeneration, the creation
of urban villages, social exclusion, the nature of the state, real estate
investment and speculation, sustainable urban development, or pol-
icy discourse analysis. At the same time, urban planning in develop-
ing countries has added reflections on urban space, postcolonialism,
social relations, etc., both at the theoretical level and in response to
the requirements of the government of the day, and concerns about
what is needed to improve planning processes, especially those re-
lated to participatory engagement, often presupposing that these pro-
cesses will lead, without question, to improved environmental and spa-
tial outcomes. Concerns about the interconnectedness of space, place,
power, subject, and identity are likely to include closer attention to
the discursive and material struggles of planning practice and regula-
tion in particular areas, as well as the goals and effects in place-making
(Huxley, 2021).
In terms of development level, Chinese cities are still in a stage of
rapid change and rapid development. In recent years, the efficiency of
urban governance in China has been greatly enhanced with the rapid rise
of new industries and the continuous application of technological inno-
vations. Local governments have not only relied on new technologies
to explore government management optimization paths such as gov-
ernment data interconnection and big data platform construction, but
also made full use of big data and artificial intelligence technology as-
sistance to achieve governance precision, and even applied biometric
technologies represented by face recognition, fingerprint recognition,
iris recognition, etc. in urban security, police, and finance. At the same
time, the synergistic innovation between government and enterprises
in urban governance is also increasingly apparent. A number of Inter-
net giant enterprises have started to provide a basket of solutions and
one-stop architecture services for urban governance, or multiple enter-
prises cut in from different scenarios to jointly help urban governance.
From an international perspective, China is playing a stabilizing role
in driving the global urban recovery process. Against the backdrop of
challenging globalization, China’s cooperation with other countries in
areas such as infrastructure, digital economy, industrialization, climate
change, green development and public health has deepened, and the
level of policy communication and rule alignment has increased, facil-
itating the joint achievement of diversified, autonomous, balanced and
sustainable development among cities in different countries and inject-
ing strong momentum into the recovery of cities in the broader region
and even globally.
5. Conclusions and future outlook
5.1. Conclusions
This study compares and analyzes urban governance research pa-
pers in the SCI and SSCI databases of the WoS core collection, and then
grasps the overview, evolutionary trends and hot topics of research. The
conclusions of this study contain four aspects.
14
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Urban Governance xxx (xxxx) xxx
(a) Urban governance is a hot research field with a yearly increas-
ing papers, and shows a new stage. 1067 articles were published
between 1997 and 2019, and the annual number changes in a
wave-shaped upward trend, especially since 2019, the number
of urban governance papers issued has increased rapidly and en-
tered a rapid development stage at this stage.
(b) The disciplinary intellectual structure of urban governance
mainly includs urbanism, publicity and technology. From the dis-
ciplinary classification, the literature on urban governance occu-
pies a relatively large proportion in the fields of ecology and en-
vironment, geography, urban studies, government law, etc., and
there are more interdisciplinary studies, and the disciplines cross
and penetrate each other, forming a research vein of intercon-
nection and continuous extension. From the perspective of jour-
nal publication, the distribution of urban governance literature
sources is relatively scattered, mainly with SSCI journal papers,
forming a more mature basic theory system of urban governance.
(c) Cooperation among researchers from different organizations pro-
moted the development of this field. From the viewpoint of pub-
lishing institutions, UCL, SHANGHAI JIAO TONG UNIV, UNIV
AMSTERDAM and UNIV SHEFFIELD are the main institutions
carrying out urban governance research, and the network of re-
lated cooperative research institutions is large in scale and closely
connected internally. In terms of national/regional cooperation,
the United States has the largest amount of literature in the
current global research on urban governance, and most coun-
tries/regions have direct or indirect cooperation with Sweden
and England.The overall level is still a certain gap between dif-
ferent countries, and some countries/regions have less connected
research cooperation networks and have not yet formed a broader
scale of cooperation. Through the analysis of the two-model net-
work of research themes and institutions, many universities and
research institutes conduct relevant research around urban gov-
ernance, but the research focuses and directions differ greatly.
Research on urban governance focuses on urban policy, urban
management, smart cities, and climate change, and there is effec-
tive cooperation among different institutions to jointly promote
research on globalized urban governance systems.
(d) There are nine hot topics of urban governance, which are (1) cit-
izenship as a core element, (2) urban monitoring and evaluation,
(3) development and challenges in the global South. (4) urban
mobility and sustainable development, (5) institutional concepts
and challenges, (6) technological change and governance trans-
formation. (7) metropolitan governance and innovation, (8) ur-
ban politics and intergovernmental relations, and (9) urban gov-
ernance in China.
Taken together, urban governance is a complex issue that has re-
ceived widespread attention from countries around the world in recent
years. It is a hot topic of academic research. Nuno et al. (2019) point
out that the lack of systematically collected comparable data in cur-
rent urban governance research and the complexity of governance con-
cepts limit the development of empirical research. With the in-depth
research on urban governance in recent years, and based on the meth-
ods of case studies and comparative studies, scholars have introduced
quantitative studies and mixed studies into urban governance-related
topics through data collection methods such as questionnaire surveys
and secondary data collection, which have greatly enriched the liter-
ature on urban governance. However, due to the complexity of urban
governance and the lack of systematic data to comprehensively ana-
lyze urban governance issues, it is difficult to form a unified urban
theory at present. In addition, through the econometric analysis of ur-
ban governance-related literature, this paper finds that the current re-
search themes of urban governance coincide with the findings of Nuno
et al. Civic participation, democratization, and governance innovation
are heavily mentioned, and urban politics, public services, and develop-
JID: UGJ
ARTICLE IN PRESS
K. Song, Y. Chen, Y. Duan et al.
ment capacity become prominent areas of concern, while other impor-
tant issues include urban institutions and policies, technology, and effi-
ciency and adaptability. Further digging reveals that the process of ur-
ban civic participation and democratization has brought about changes
in the form of governance, and governance innovation models such as
multi-level governance, networked governance, and collaborative gov-
ernance have become hot topics, and the discussion of the relationship
between the central government and the local government provides new
perspectives for the study of urban intergovernmental relations and ur-
ban cluster construction. At the same time, with the intensification of
urban uncertainty and many challenges in the urbanization process,
smart cities and resilient cities gradually become the focus, urban emer-
gency management receives general attention, and the exploration of
urban environment, sustainable development and urban-rural relation-
ship lays the foundation for related topics. The governance of megacities
is a challenge and a topic that needs to be explored in depth, especially
in the Chinese context, where the governance of megacities has become
the focus of many scholars, and better research results are expected
to provide Chinese wisdom and Chinese solutions to the problems of
megacities.
5.2. Limitations
There are several limitations in this systematic review of current ur-
ban governance research:
(a) The theoretical system construction and research depth of urban
studies need to be strengthened. At present, there are fewer stud-
ies on the theoretical basis of urban governance, and mainly focus
on neoliberal theory, urban system theory, metropolitan gover-
nance, etc. However, there is a lack of research on the theoretical
basis of urban governance, especially in the current complex ur-
ban development context, whether the theoretical framework of
urban governance research can be further refined and developed
is a question worthy of deep consideration by the academic com-
munity.
(b) The subjects and practices of urban governance research need to
be expanded. With the change of governance structure and mode,
the government-led urban governance research is gradually shift-
ing to multi-participation governance, and there are more stud-
ies on the ways to achieve public participation in the existing
research, but there is a lack of market-oriented and third-party
subject participation studies.
(c) The research on challenges and innovations of urban governance
needs to be deepened. At present, theoretical research on urban
governance often lags behind practical development, and due to
the complexity of data collection and governance related to ur-
ban governance, urban governance issues emerge and even take
a long time to get attention, which seriously hinders the sustain-
able development of cities. At the same time, there are still many
uncertainties in cities’ response to major global challenges, trans-
formation to more sustainable development, and governance in-
novation.
(d) urban governance research methods should be strengthened with
quantitative studies. Although some of the existing studies on top-
level design of urban governance involve quantitative operations
such as model building, most of the studies on the current state
of development and effectiveness of urban governance, which
involve public management and political science disciplines, re-
main in traditional normative studies and case studies, while em-
pirical studies using primary and secondary data are still rela-
tively lacking. This is also a shortcoming of the existing research
methods.
(e) Finally, we will improve this study by using Scopus database,
which collects more literature (Mongeon & Paul-Hus, 2015;
Martín-Martín et al., 2018) than WoS used by this study.
15
[m5GeSdc;August 7, 2023;17:3]
Urban Governance xxx (xxxx) xxx
5.3. Future outlook
In view of the shortcomings in the current urban governance re-
search, combined with the global urbanization development process and
practice, future research needs to focus on the following four aspects.
First of all, to pay attention to the inner logic of urban governance
and technological development and urbanization construction. In the fu-
ture, on the basis of clarifying urban governance and its related concepts
and theoretical connotations, we should further clarify the top-level
design and development strategies of urban governance, and deeply
promote the development of urban governance to deeper areas. We
should gradually promote the application and improvement of urban
governance-related theories in practice, and build a theoretical system
of urban governance in line with the sustainable development of cities
by combining urban governance practices, and then promote the high-
quality development of global cities.
Secondly, the existing research content should be continuously en-
riched. On the basis of the development of existing urban governance
practices, we should make urban construction and development lay-
out according to local conditions, promote the efficient flow of digi-
tal technology and other elements, and accelerate the construction of
smart cities, resilient cities, sponge cities and other characteristic cities
(Khatibi et al., 2022; Ma et al., 2023). Exploring the role of social or-
ganizations in urban governance in the context of marketization, and
In-depth research on the quality and effect of public service supply on
the mechanism of urban governance, revealing the inner mechanism of
urban governance on the improvement of people’s quality of life and
proposing a scientific and reasonable optimization path. In addition, we
should actively pay attention to the impact of the current changes in in-
ternational understanding of climate change and environmental protec-
tion on urban governance, actively explore and propose theories, tech-
nologies and methods to improve urban environment, and continuously
and effectively improve a series of problems such as urban environmen-
tal degradation.
Thirdly, deepen the research interpretation continuously. We should
encourage the integration of multidisciplinary perspectives in urban
governance research, strengthen the summary and refinement of inno-
vative practices of urban governance, and then form replicable gov-
ernance highlights and governance experiences. We should also ac-
tively address the challenges of traffic congestion, environmental pol-
lution, resource constraints and other "urban diseases" in the context
of globalization and marketization, and actively solve the prominent
problems in urban construction on the basis of coordinated devel-
opment. At the same time, stakeholder-orientation is critical to fos-
tering sustainable urban development through synergic collaborations
among urban stakeholders (Beck & Ferasso, 2023). Social and rela-
tional capital also plays a critical role within those urban networks
which creates value for all people and promotes collective learning
(Beck & Storopoli, 2021). Therefore, enhancing the effectiveness and
sustainability of urban governance requires strengthening the synergy
of multiple actors and improving the multi-stakeholder participation
mechanism of government, enterprises, citizens, and social organiza-
tions etc. Based on the useful experience of stakeholders in promot-
ing urban renewal (Lin et al, 2019), grassroots community governance
(Zhou, 2021) and resilient governance (Nop et al., 2023), the role in
other areas of urban governance can continue to be deepened in the
future, such as optimizing the business environment, ecological and en-
vironmental management, infrastructure development, and emergency
management etc.
Fourthly, we should make efforts to promote quantitative research.
In future research on urban governance, we should overcome the dif-
ficulties of data collection, pay attention to the establishment of a the-
oretical framework through research, interviews, and case studies, and
use quantitative analysis methods to carry out empirical tests, critically
innovate the existing theoretical framework, and realize the effective
combination of quantitative and qualitative research.
JID: UGJ
ARTICLE IN PRESS
K. Song, Y. Chen, Y. Duan et al.
Declaration of Competing Interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial
interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence
the work reported in this paper.
Acknowledgement
This work was carried out in the frame of the major project supported
by Ministry of Education of the People’s Republic of China (MOE of
PRE) and the cooperative doctoral programs supported by the China
Scholarship Council (CSC). The authors warmly acknowledge MOE of
PRE and CSC for their support.
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