Coping with the multifaceted crises of contemporary urbanization necessitates a more com-prehensive understanding of the diverse patterns of urbanization. Among these, urban informality, as an archetypal model of urbanization, has emerged as an important way to foster sustainable development on our planet. Existing scholarly publications have separately addressed theories and development strategies pertaining to the urbanization crisis and re-search on urban informality. However, there has been no systematic review encompassing literature from both domains. This study employs a combination of bibliometric analysis and empirical investigation to critically evaluate the literature on urbanization crisis and urban informality in terms of temporal and spatial dimensions, aiming to extract local experiences and identify trends from diverse practices across different regions and cities. The literature review included 4013 papers retrieved from the Web of Science Core Collection database. Firstly, the paper conducts a bibliometric analysis to demonstrate the phased characteristics of urban informality during the process of urbanization crisis. Secondly, from a global geographical perspective, this study provides a detailed review of the frequency and distribution of informal research topics within the context of urbanization crisis. Thirdly, it explores local strategies for addressing the challenges posed by urbanization crisis through three main aspects: informal employment, informal settlements, and informal water supply facilities. Lastly, this paper discusses emerging research trends and future directions in this field. • Under the background of urbanization crisis, urban informality is divided into three stages. • Top three countries with a high frequency of studies on urban informality and urbanization crisis include China, India, and US. • The high-frequency topics in urban informal research have centered on urbanization development and energy consumption. • Urban informality mainly puts forward local strategies to cope with the challenges brought by urbanization crisis from three aspects.
Chen et al. (Wed,) studied this question.