The evolution of urban competitiveness studies over the past 30 years. A bibliometric analysis

Since the 1990s, the scientific debate on territorial competitiveness has gone through different phases due to the various events that have occurred such as uncontrolled urbanisation, globalisation and digitalisation. Initially linked to competition between companies and, subsequently, to the productivity of countries, today, competitiveness is played out between territories and, above all, between cities. For this reason, competitiveness has become a characteristic of the city and can therefore be considered multidimensional from a systemic perspective typical of urban studies. Researchers agree in defining it as the ability to attract investments, business, creativity, talents and visitors, which is possible by enhancing various urban dimensions. The review presented in this paper analyses the foremost definitions and paradigms, investigates quantitative approaches and identifies the main trends and research gaps concerning the topic of urban competitiveness, through a bibliometric analysis. We have selected almost 1600 documents published between 1967 and 2020 from the Scopus database and we have examined them using bibliometric tools such as VOSiewer and ScientoPy. The aim is to analyse the diachronic and geographical evolution of research, to define future development and directions. The result is that the approach to the research depends on a wide variety of factors, including the time of publication, the scientific framework, the models and, lastly, the region the study comes from. We found that the ability to cope with future challenges has gradually taken on an essential role in defining how competitive a city is on an international scale, especially following the 2008 global financial crisis and the more recent COVID-19 crisis.