Antoine Peris (p), Evert Meijers

Nadine Fritz

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 seems rather fragmented. This study aims to analyse the body of literature that has developed over the last 25 years to identify schools of thought within this literature and to see whether they relate to each other or draw their inspiration from other scientific fields. A delineation strategy is first created to collect the set of papers addressing systems of cities. Then, a semantic map is extracted from the title and abstract of papers. It reveals the methodological and empirical aspects of the different schools within the literature as well as their main objectives and ‘imported’ concepts. By coupling the semantic map with the citation networks of the publications, this study confirms the fragmentation of the field and shows three main foci: studies that develop concepts and theory, those that are empirically oriented, and those that are planning oriented. Some of them appear as very homogenous in term of vocabulary and citation patterns, some others act as bridges between the different subfields.

Nadine Fritz (p), Michael Bentlage, Stefan Lüthi, Alain Thierstein

Antoine Peris

See extended abstract