Ecological Indicators (Feb 2021)
Urban sustainability assessment: An overview and bibliometric analysis
Abstract
Following the recognition of the significance of urban areas for achieving sustainable development in the late 1980′s, first studies on ‘urban sustainability assessment’ were published in early 1990s. Since then, the field has grown rapidly, with over 300 papers published annually in recent years. The main objective of this study is to present a bibliometric analysis of about thirty years of research on urban sustainability assessment. The literature database includes 3877 articles published in the Web of Science. VOSviewer and SciMAT are two science mapping software tools that were utilized for this purpose. VOSviewer is utilized to detect major focus areas and to identify influential authors, publications, and journals using various network analysis techniques such as term co-occurrence, co-citation, and bibliographic coupling. Also, SciMAT is used to understand how the intellectual base of the field has evolved over time and what are the major themes that have contributed to this evolution. For this purpose, the study interval was divided into four sub-periods (i.e., 1991–2000; 2001–2009; 2010–2015; and 2016–2020). Results show that this field has initially been mainly focused on few themes but has later become more diversified to acknowledge the multi-dimensional characteristics of urban sustainability. Despite this, environmental aspects are still dominant and major socio-economic issues such as equity, justice, and public engagement are not well represented. Sustainable development indicators, energy, green infrastructure, water, land use, and urban design are major thematic areas, with the first three playing more important roles in structuring the development of the field. This study can be used as a point of reference for those interested in gaining more knowledge about urban sustainability assessment and its evolution.
