Abstract:

With people's enhancing awareness of the importance of urban-rural integration and food safety, urban agriculture (UA) has become an important part of sustainable urban development planning and design. The development of UA serves as an effective supplement to rural agriculture and provides multiple ecosystem services to urban residents. To address the research hot topics and trends of UA in China, this article is based on the literature related to UA collected by China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI) in the past 20 years, the CiteSpace graph method is applied to draw and analyze a visual graph of its publication volume, institutions, authors and keywords, analyzing the research hotspots, frontiers, and overall evolutionary paths of UA research in China from 2003 to 2012 and 2013 to 2022, respectively. The results indicated that: (1) from 2003 to 2012, the overall number of publications showed an upward trend, and reached its peak in 2011(122 ); from 2013 to 2022, there was a trend of first decreasing and then gradually stabilizing, with the lowest number of publications in 2018, only 34. (2) From 2003 to 2012, the author with the most publications on urban agriculture in China was Zhou Pei, with 9 publications. The Institute of Geographical Sciences and Resources of the Chinese Academy of Sciences had issued the most papers, reaching 18. The author with the most publications from 2013-2022 is Zhou Zhongxue, with 19. The institution with the highest number of publications was the School of Tourism and Environment of Shaanxi Normal University, with a total of 19 articles. (3) From 2003 to 2012, the six keywords “UA”, “development of UA”, “countermeasures for UA”, “new rural construction”, “green Beijing” and “Beijing City” constituted the research hotspots and frontiers of UA in China's academic community. From 2013 to 2022, the three keywords of “metropolitan area”, “urbanization” and “UA” had become research hotspots. The three keywords of “landscape architecture”, “rural revitalization” and “rural population transfer” had become core issues of this field in the future. The institutions and authors that contributed the most to UA research in the past 20 years from 2003 to 2022 had changed, indicating that new scholars and institutions had joined the research team on UA study. However, relevant scholars and institutions lacked sustainability in their research on UA. Based on the characteristics presented by the UA researches, future research areas should continue to focus on rural revitalization and expanding the research scope and depth of the agricultural transfer population. The authors suggest that local governments should carry out the development of UA based on local characteristics.

Key words: UA, CiteSpace, CNKI, visual analysis, knowledge graph