A Land Use Planning Literature Review: Literature Path, Planning Contexts, Optimization Methods, and Bibliometric Methods

Land use planning studies are accumulating in unprecedented quantities, and have created a wide space for an extensive summary, the synthesis of fundamental developments, a sharpening of the focus of future study issues, and the dissemination of concise information among the academic community and the policy making environment. Nonetheless, the publication rate and content coverage of land use planning literature reviews have been relatively low. This study aims to contribute to the field by first assessing the effectiveness of the bibliometric method as a literature study method. It then summarizes the developments in the land use planning literature in general path building process, the planning context, and the development of methods. The study findings highlight that the bibliometric method tends to reward information carriage papers rather than original contributors. More than 85% of the time, published articles are cited for general information rather than their core research contribution, suggesting the incomprehensiveness of the bibliometric method in studying real knowledge development. In terms of the land use planning context, significant gaps are observed, particularly in urban land use, including the detachment of the general goal-oriented objective formulations from basic land use allocation theories and conceptual models. A serious concern also arises that the formulations of certain urban land use optimization objectives appear to contradict the original concept of a sustainable city. To address these gaps, this paper suggests several key research frontiers, including linking the basic land use allocation and utility theories to land use optimization, and a need to shift current urban land use planning/optimization approaches from spatial optimization, which changes land uses to meet flow resources, towards optimizing the flow of resources to fit the resilient nature of existing spatial configurations and physical establishments in the built environment. Additionally, evaluating the existing built environment for optimality should be prioritized rather than solely focusing on new developments. In terms of method development, the study suggests that advancing current loosely coupled methods into more integrated systems may be a promising frontier. In general, the paper strongly suggests the possible reiteration of the land use planning study landscape to make sustainable development discourse more concrete and to make the method development stage involve more integrated systems. Immediate research interventions may be the standardizing of land use planning studies through the development of protocols and standard benchmark problems.