Domain Analysis of ‘Urban’ in Library Classification Schemes

Preedip Balaji  | 2019

Abstract

Urban is a complex domain, dealing with characteristics of life in cities to meet the needs of urban society. With a changing demography, spatial and socio-economic conditions, urbanization is experienced in the globalized cities, as half of the world’s population live in large cities and towns in 21st century. There are ongoing debates on positing ‘urban’ in social science, science and technology and in arts disciplines, which interpret and define the meaning of ‘urban.’ However, the existing disciplines are interdisciplinary, intersectional and diversified with various approaches, models and theories to study urbanism. Towards the goal of arriving at the subject treatment of urban, this paper analyzes the domain of urban studies through Library of Congress (LC), Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC) and Universal Decimal Classification (UDC) schemes. Through this analysis, we investigate the key disciplines, vocabularies, and diversity of subjects in urban studies.