Recent urban geography studies in Spain. Three decades interpreting the cityand urbanisation processes (1992-2022)

Abstract

: In recent decades, the city has changed in extraordinary ways, mainly as aconsequence of urban processes and phenomena characteristic of post-fordism andglobalisation. Since 2000, the effects on the city of the economic crisis and the burstingof the real estate bubble and, more recently, the COVID-19 pandemic, inaugurated anew type of research. As a result, in Spain, Urban Geography has positioned itself as oneof the most dynamic geographical disciplines and has been able to read these changes inthe city, both morphologically and socially.In this context, the aim of this paper is to carry out a diagnosis of the bibliographicalproduction of Urban Geography in Spain over the last three decades based on two typesof sources. On the one hand, the publications of the Urban Geography Group of theSpanish Association of Geography (AGE); and, on the other, a selection of articlespublished in high impact journals according to four main variables: study territories(cities with more than 50,000 inhabitants), scales (urban or intra-urban,neighbourhoods), main themes, and characterisation of the selected journals. Themethodology is based on a bibliographic search and the subsequent systematisation ofthe information collected. Although it is not our intention to quantify exactly the numberof publications, we chose key words in the conceptual field investigated and carried outan exhaustive search in bibliographic repositories (Web of Science) since 2000.1. IntroductionUrban geography is becoming one of the most dynamic lines of research in Spanishgeography while the urban debate has also gained interest in recent years. It is adynamism that can be assessed by taking different variables into account: an increase inthe number of members in the AGE Urban Geography Group (GGU), outstandingscientific activity and a high capacity to adapt the study topics of publications andseminars to the new realities and socio-urban processes and, above all, theinternationalisation and our geographers’ publications in high impact journals.