This review paper explores some of the key concepts, trends and approaches in contemporary urban governance research. Based on a horizon scan of recent literature and a survey of local government officials it provides a big picture on the topic and identifies areas for future research. Bridging the gap between the scholarly research focus and the perceptions and requirements of city administrators represents a major challenge for the field. Furthermore, because global and comparative research on urban governance is confronted with an absence of systematically collected, comparable data, the paper argues that future efforts will require experimenting with methodologies that can generate new empirical insights
