Who Plans the City? A Text Mining Approach to Understanding Power in Urban Governance

This study develops theory on power in urban planning by combining a PRISMA-guided systematic review with computational topic modeling. From a screened corpus of 99 peer-reviewed studies, latent Dirichlet allocation identifies five recurring debates (multi-level state power, land-use and urban development, discursive-politics, social participation and networks, and policy instruments). Building on these clusters, we synthesize an integrative typology of five power configurations and a process model explaining how power bases translate into planning arenas, mechanisms, and distributive outcomes. We derive propositions and boundary conditions that clarify when participatory planning redistributes power versus reproduces elite capture. The review offers a theory-advancing agenda and actionable diagnostics for practitioners seeking more inclusive and just urban governance.