The Evolution of the Systems of Cities Literature Since 1995: Schools of Thought and their Interaction

Abstract

The study of relations between cities has long been a major focus in urban research. For decades, this field has grown integrating contributions from many disciplines. But today, the field appears rather fragmented. This study analyses the body of literature that has developed over the last 23 years to identify schools of thought on interurban relationships and to see to what extent these interact with each other. It does so by innovatively employing bibliometric analysis to the study of systems of cities, which allows a bottom-up identification of five schools of thought: one predominantly focusing on the regional or intra-metropolitan scale and centred on concepts of polycentricity; one addressing the global scale with a focus on world city networks; one employing simulation and complexity theories to understand behaviour of agents building the urban system bottom-up; one rooted in (new) economic geography and focusing on growth and decline in the urban system; and, one seeking regularities with respect to city size distributions. The conceptual, methodological and empirical aspects of these different schools are discussed by means of a 'semantic map' derived from the vocabulary of titles and abstracts of papers. The coupling of the semantic map with the citation networks of these schools of thought confirms the increasing fragmentation of the field over the last decades. However, in the most recent years, the different schools of thought start to interact slightly more. The desirability and feasibility of a move from multidisciplinarity to interdisciplinarity in urban systems research needs further exploration.

Uncovering Links Between Urban Studies and Network Science

“…But the diversity instilled by the differences in scale, processes, and ontological outlook paint an overall picture of a literature some might describe as fragmented, but which we would prefer (adopting a network view) to describe as composed of multiple communities. This is confirmed by Peris et al (2018), who, drawing on a bibliometric analysis, identify different schools of thought in the urban networks literature structured by conceptual, methodological and empirical differences. Because the fields of Urban Studies and Network Science are themselves multifaceted, it is inevitable that the emerging field of urban networks will have similarly fuzzy boundaries.…”

“…analysis of the making and dissolution of research and development collaboration in a region, see Broekel and Bednarz 2018). In addition, some papers take a broad view by asking questions about the evolution of this field through bibliometric analysis (Peris et al 2018), or about the quality of empirical evidence derived from network analyses of urban data (Neal 2018).…”

Revisiting urban hierarchy and specialization from a maritime perspective

“…physics) investigated this field, sharing the idea that urban growth and evolution were dictated by specific laws. These are well-summarized in the work of Pumain et al (2006), and more recently by Peris et al (2018) for the relational perspective. The ideas developed by these diverse approaches are worth being confronted to our new empirical results as they encompass the whole social / natural science spectrum and is still up-to-date in terms of urban growth and evolution mechanisms.…”

“…The French geographer Denise Pumain had been one of the first to find ways adapting USA and Swedish quantitative geography to the French urban system (Peris et al, 2018). Although other schools about urban systems emerged since then (i.e.…”

Analysis of spatial networks from bipartite projections using the R backbone package

“…A bipartite projection defines a network among a set of nodes (e.g., cities, countries) by defining the strength of the connections between nodes in terms of their shared attributes (e.g., the number of firms located in two cities, the number of treaties signed by two counties). This approach has become the de facto method for measuring the world city network (Taylor, 2001;Taylor & Derudder, 2016), but is also used in other areas of geography at multiple geographic scales: at the macro-scale bipartite projections measure networks of international relations (e.g., Hafner-Burton, Kahler, & Montgomery, 2009), at the micro-scale they measure neighborhood social networks (e.g., Browning, Calder, Soller, Jackson, & Dirlam, 2017), and at a meta-scale they have been used to study the structure of schools of thought in geography (e.g., Peris, Meijers, & van Ham, 2018). Despite their promise and the apparent ease with which they can be constructed, using bipar-tite projections to measure spatial networks is not always straightforward.…”