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The evolution of the systems of cities literature since 1995 : schools of thought and their interaction

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Peris_2018_NSE_Systemsofcities_CC.pdf (1.280Mb)
Date
31/07/2018
Author
Peris, Antoine
Meijers, Evert
van Ham, Maarten
Keywords
Urban system
System of cities
Urban network
Bibliometric analysis
Text mining
G Geography (General)
Z665 Library Science. Information Science
3rd-DAS
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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.
Citation
Peris , A , Meijers , E & van Ham , M 2018 , ' The evolution of the systems of cities literature since 1995 : schools of thought and their interaction ' , Networks and Spatial Economics , vol. First Online . https://doi.org/10.1007/s11067-018-9410-5
Publication
Networks and Spatial Economics
Status
Peer reviewed
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11067-018-9410-5
ISSN
1566-113X
Type
Journal article
Rights
© The Author(s) 2018. Open Access. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.
Description
This work was funded through a VIDI grant (452-14-004) provided by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO).
Collections
  • University of St Andrews Research
URI
http://hdl.handle.net/10023/15745

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