Urban and peri-urban agriculture in sustainable cities: scientometric mapping of research trends, networks, and thematic structure

Abstract

Urban and peri-urban agriculture (UPA) is increasingly examined in relation to urban sustainability, food security, green infrastructure, and climate adaptation. This study mapped the structure and development of open-access research on UPA indexed in the Web of Science (WoS) through 2025. The corpus comprised 822 articles and reviews selected according to access, document-type, and time-span criteria and analyzed using publication and citation indicators, international collaboration and citation networks, keyword co-occurrence, Bradford’s Law, and document-level thematic clustering. VOSviewer, Bibliometrix/R, and GongoloMetrics v1.0.0 were used for network, performance, and thematic analyses. Publication output increased between 2007 and 2025, with stronger growth after 2020 and a positive descriptive linear trend (R² = 0.86). The United States, China, Germany, and the United Kingdom showed high publication output, while citation impact and international connectivity represented related but distinct dimensions of the corpus. Keyword and document-level analyses showed strong associations among food security, land-use planning, green infrastructure, ecosystem services, resource management, and climate adaptation, with increasing attention in recent publications to nature-based solutions, circularity, and technology-intensive production systems. Six non-overlapping document clusters accounted for all 822 records. These findings describe patterns within the open-access WoS corpus and should not be interpreted as a complete representation of global scholarship or as direct evidence of the real-world effectiveness of UPA interventions. Open-access Web of Science research on urban and peri-urban agriculture increased markedly after 2020. Food security, land-use planning, green infrastructure, and ecosystem services are recurrent research themes. Recent publications increasingly address vertical farming, smart systems, circularity, and resource efficiency. Publication output, citation impact, and international connectivity show distinct geographic patterns. Six non-overlapping document clusters account for all 822 records in the thematic classification.