Urban flood resilience: mapping knowledge, trends and structure through bibliometric analysis

The discourse on urban flood resilience and the notions associated with the word has grown enormously and has been discovered to be in staggering form. This paper intends to provide a bibliometric analysis of nearly 30 years of urban flood resilience by mapping the knowledge domain, identifying evolving themes & trends over time, and extracting publications addressing urban flood resilience from the Scopus database. Trends, evolution, and mapping purpose of subject and field information analysis are undertaken using VOSviewer and SciMAT tools. The VOSviewer programme highlights the emphasis areas, whereas SciMAT traces the field’s intellectual evolution across time and the essential themes that drove the transition. The study period is divided into four segments: 1996–2005, 2006–2010, 2011–2015, and 2016–2022 based on the significant international policy milestones. The findings of the analysis highlight that the urban flood resilience field initially concentrated on a few themes and subsequently expanded to encompass the multi-dimensional characteristics of urban area resilience. In recent years, spatial planning approaches, nature-based and sustainable solutions, community-based and citizen science approaches, application of artificial intelligence, urban–rural relationship in resilience aspect, health services, and critical infrastructure networks have been the field's primary themes and concerns for achieving and assessing urban flood resilience. Despite a lack of emphasis on resilience assessment methods and approaches favouring conceptual framework and factors, it is observed that these themes are emerging in the developing scenario to solve the resilience concepts. The research may serve as a springboard for people's and policymakers' concerns about climate change and its effects, infrastructure development to improve the health and social well-being of societies, and a desire to learn more about resolving urban flooding problems in order to enhance flood management concepts pertaining to urban flood resilience and its history. Hence, a comprehensive list of themes and thematic areas concerning urban flood resilience with varying weights according to contexts is recommended, leading to the development of the urban flood resilient assessment tool and modifying the existing tools to reflect better the holistic understanding of sustainable and resilient cities/areas.