RETHINKING URBAN LAND DYNAMICS: INTEGRATIVE PATHWAYS FOR CLIMATE RESILIENCE AND SOCIO-ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE

Urbanization is accelerating land-system transformations, reshaping ecological processes, socio-economic structures, and governance frameworks. Combining a bibliometric mapping of 6,796 records retrieved from OpenAlex and screened against explicit criteria with an in-depth synthesis of 145 sources, we examine how climate change, economic restructuring, demographic transitions, and technological innovation interact to drive non-linear urban and peri-urban land dynamics. Our findings show that the field is organized around two weakly connected epistemic communities, one that measures land and another that interprets the social processes acting on it. No term relating to tenure, informality, or environmental justice appears among its sixty most frequent concepts. The field has narrowed rather than broadened: climate framing rose from 41.5% of publications in 2006-2010 to 64.7% in 2021-2025, while demographic framing fell from 19.9% to 9.3% and justice framing never exceeded 5.2%. The methods used are distributed asymmetrically: objectivist, measurement-based families appear in 69.5% of the corpus, and interpretive or co-productive families in 8.4%. The field's measurement precision has therefore grown faster than its explanatory reach, and its blind spots are systematic rather than random. On this basis, we set out what a transdisciplinary alternative would require and translate it into governance and research priorities.