Abstract

Evolution of cities is a subject of research for over a hundred years in the organization of urban knowledge systems. Locating five key methodological approaches used by urban scholars and practitioners, this paper demonstrates different relationships between urban studies and classification. Five significant themes form the background of urban studies literature. The first theme sources and literature explore organizing urban materials into sources and literature with a unique dimension of spatiality. The second theme discusses three important facets: scale as a geographic unit of analysis and space as an abstract entity and system as a set of interdependent parts of urban places. The third theme, known as “other” urban, argued for the poor treatment of global south and how it builds inclusivity. The fourth theme, classification and retrieval, investigates the relationship between urban materials and user needs. The last theme, classification schemes, highlights subject treatment of urban in the existing library classification schemes. This paper concludes that the five themes discussed point to a model of urban studies classification. However, this model is not just concerned with urban methods, facets and formats, but explores how each theme interconnects with various sets of people—urbanists, practitioners and librarians—and through studying these actors, established boundaries of urban theories, urban librarianship and knowledge organization are crossed.