Bibliometric Analysis of Urban Carrying Capacity: History, Current Status, Development and Future Direction

For stable functioning of an urban area, a balance between natural resources, urban infrastructure, and population is very much required. That’s where concept of carrying capacity comes into the picture to find out limitation and current overloading on natural resources and urban infrastructure. In this study to understand growth of research work on Urban Carrying Capacity (UCC) from seed to tree, a thorough bibliometric analysis has been done in R language-based software package called Biblioshiny which is an online web-based data analysis framework. Analysis has been done for the time span of 1978 to 2021, from which 327 manually filtered documents have been selected. The results show that (1) since 1978, papers on UCC are gradually increasing. This time span is divided into low production period, stable production period and rapid production period (2) UCC research covers 28 countries, out of which China, Indonesia and USA are the top three. In which China is having the most number of papers and collaboration with other countries (3) Sustainable development, ecological carrying capacity, ecological footprint, environment carrying capacity, water resources and analytical hierarchy process are the high-frequency keywords used in recent years (4) Mostly papers are focused on single factors based studies (land-based, water-based, air-based, infrastructure-based) and low numbers papers are on comprehensive analysis. Finally, study conclude that future scope on UCC includes strengthening existing definition and theory of carrying capacity, introducing new technology and model in the system like artificial intelligence, work on more comprehensive analysis than single-factor analysis and constructing a practical planning policy.