Abstract

Global urbanization has occurred mainly in informal settlements in the Global South and is accompanied by tenure insecurity, lack of basic services, and environmental vulnerability. This phenomenon has exacerbated the crisis of the duality between formal and informal institutions, while the research literature, focusing on a simplified duality, has failed to grasp the complexity of institutional interactions. This study aims to reproduce an integrated conceptual map of institutional developments and identify research gaps, answering the key question: How has the conceptual structure of institutions evolved from duality to dynamic continuity? The research method is descriptive-analytical with a bibliometric approach and knowledge network analysis, which analyzed 342 reliable Scopus sources (1977–2025) with VOS viewer software and extracted 256 keywords and 4,678 semantic links. The findings reveal seven conceptual clusters and three historical transitions: the first transition (1977–2016) from monocentric planning to participatory governance; the second transition (2016–2020) with the integration of climate challenges and the emergence of adaptive governance; and the third transition (2020–2025) with a focus on land justice and postcolonial critique in which informality is no longer redefined as a defect but as a space for struggle over access to vital resources. This research identifies three gaps: an institutional gap (formal/informal separation), a geographical gap (focus on Africa and Asia and lack of comparative analyses for the Middle East and Central Asia), and a methodological gap (predominance of qualitative studies). The conclusion shows that contemporary understanding of institutions has evolved towards dynamic processes of struggle over access to land, and the "institution-power-space" framework can provide a basis for more equitable policymaking in developing cities.