Making Decisions for Urban Regeneration: A Bibliometric Analysis and Critical Review

Urban regeneration provides opportunities to address urban problems in order to achieve sustainable urban development, which has received significant attention worldwide. As the practice of urban regeneration practice is a complicated system engineering, inappropriate urban regeneration strategies may cause huge economic loss, exacerbate social problems, and even hinder long-term development for urban sectors. Scientific decision-making on urban regeneration before its implementation has gradually been regarded as one of the most effective solutions to such a challenging issue. Although existing studies have begun to pay attention to the issue of urban regeneration decision-making, an integrated and systematic review covering the whole decision process has yet to be produced. To overcome the gap, using 293 articles which were published between 1968 and 2022 collected from the Web of Science Core Collection Database, a bibliometric analysis offers the overall development and hot research topics of the existing research in urban regeneration. To better clarify the mechanism behind the urban regeneration decision-making, based on the bibliometric analysis’s results, this paper proposes a novel conceptual decision-making process framework for urban regeneration and critically reviews the previous theoretical landscape in terms of the five components of the framework, namely decision objectives, decision content, decision-makers, decision methods and decision results. The paper also outlines pathways and provides recommendations for future research directions.