A Review of Urban Planning Research for Climate Change

This paper identified the research focus and development tendency of urban planning and climate change research from 1990 to 2016 using CiteSpace, which is based on the Web of Science database. Through cluster analysis and a document sorting method, the research direction of city planning and climate change were mainly divided into four academic groupings, 15 clusters with homogenous themes representing the current research focus direction at the sub-level. The detailed study on the framework presented three mainstream developing directions: (1) The index assessment and spatial simulation on the impact of urban spatial systems for climate change have become important methods to identify and improve the adaptability of urban space. (2) Adaptive governance as a bottom-up strategy giving priority to institutional adaptation policy and collaborative polices for responding to climate change has become the hot direction in recent years. (3) The policies of urban public health-related urban equity, vulnerability, and environmental sustainability were addressed especially during the period from 2007 to 2009. Dynamic evolution trends of the research field were discussed: (1) The total numbers of papers in this field increased distinctly between 2005 and 2008, research focus shifted from single-dimension to multi-dimension comprehensive studies, and the humanism tendency was obvious. (2) After 2010, research on multi-level governance and spatial adaptation strategies became the key issues, and a bottom-up level adaptation policies were addressed. Finally, the critical influence of the important literature and the forefront issues of the research field were put forward.