Conclusion: Perspectives on Urban Theories

At the end of the five years of work in our GeoDiverCity program, we brought together a diversity of authors from different disciplines. Each person was invited to present an important question about the theories and models of urbanization. They are representative of a variety of currents in urban research. Rather than repeat here the contents of all chapters, we propose two ways to synthesize the scientific contributions of this book. In a first part we replace them in relation to a few principles that were experimented in our program, and in a second part we situate them with respect to a broader view of international literature on these topics. The first part of this concluding chapter is a selection of salient points from our evolutionary theory of urban systems that are discussed in several of the chapters. As many of our results were already published (Pumain et al. 2015; Cura et al. 2017; Pumain & Reuillon 2017) 2 it was possible to confirm them, or to bring more different evidence or contradictory views. For each of these lively research questions, we report the convergent opinions that emerged from the topics discussed, as well as the open and even controversial perspectives for future work. The second part reports a quantitative analysis which arrives at another form of synthesis from the bibliographies of the chapters of the book and their networks of citations. This requires the use of methods for constructing and exploring large digital bibliographical data. Each part gives an overview of the current state of urban science, first of all according to its reported results and then according to the articulations between the conceptions of those who make it. We can easily imagine that in the near future, the second method will become an essential prerequisite for realizing the first, provided that further semantic analysis of the content of papers could be made.