Cities of the Gulf: A Systematic Review of Urban Development

The Gulf Cooperation Council states are among the world's most urbanized, yet research on their urban development remains fragmented. This article presents a PRISMA-ScR-guided systematic review of 140 peer-reviewed publications on Gulf urbanism (1950–2024). Literature is classified into five themes: urban history and evolution, urban form, urban policy, public versus private developments, and urban sustainability. Findings show a strong geographical and thematic unevenness, a dominance of qualitative case studies, and a persistent gap between the urban sustainability rhetoric and implementation. This review identifies key gaps and outlines priorities for comparative, multiscalar, and practice-oriented empirical research.