The landscape of informal economy research: a systematic review of transient trends, pivot, and emerging pattern: is there a spatial turn?

Informal economy (IE) activities contribute significantly to the contemporary urban dynamic. Multifaceted and prolific studies of IE are nearing 50 years. The concept of IE exists in diverse forms with discussion from different perspectives from a vast intellectual landscape. However, there is a lack of systematic review of IE literature knowledge domain evolution in relation to the broad spatial turn that has taken place in social sciences. The objective of this study is to investigate the landscape of IE research to explore and identify transient trend, pivot and emerging pattern of research front as markers of the evolution of knowledge of IE literature from a spatial turn perspective. A preliminary review establishes the platform for a systematic review. A scientometric semantic mapping of IE research extracted from 1157 IE related articles retrieved from the Scopus database provided a panoramic view identifying intellectually significant articles/concepts to understand the intellectual base and its dynamic. The top 12 ranked articles were examined in-depth to further explore the IE spatial turn. Trends analysis confirmed that the IE schools of thought overlap and identified research fronts specialities. The study showed that “spatial turn” is yet to become a focus of IE studies in terms of research strategies and analytical methods. The findings suggest that the unexplored IE spatially integrated development strategies could be adopted for future research direction, with deployment of spatial analysis techniques. The recommendations are relevant to academics, professionals, and government agencies.