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.
Highlights
Cities do not function in isolation, but are organised in systems of cities characterised by strong interdependencies that develop at the scale of a large region, a nation, a continent or even at the global scale (Pumain 2011)
This paper aims to answer the following questions: How did the system of cities literature evolve over the last two decades? Which different schools of thought can be distinguished and what are their defining elements? And, to what extent do these schools interact? Assessing interdisciplinarity in this research field is all the more important given the frequent calls for interdisciplinarity in urban systems research (Pflieger and Rozenblat 2010), and because there is clear evidence that innovation in geography – still the main discipline addressing systems of cities - is fostered by collaborations among disciplines (Ducruet and Beauguitte 2013)
This paper presented the first bibliometric analysis of the research addressing relationships between cities, referred to as ‘urban systems’ research
Summary
Cities do not function in isolation, but are organised in systems of cities characterised by strong interdependencies that develop at the scale of a large region, a nation, a continent or even at the global scale (Pumain 2011). The definition of a ‘system of cities’ by Allan Pred (1977, p.13) is still valid today: Ba national or regional set of cities that are interdependent in such a way that any significant change in the economic activities, occupational structure, total income or population of one member city will directly or indirectly bring about some modification in the economic activities, occupational structure, total income or population of one or more other set members^ Nowadays, this definition can be extended to global urban systems because of long-distance interrelationships between cities, those at the top of national urban hierarchies becoming more common
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