Abstract：With the rapid transition of both the economic system and social structure in China since 1990s, urban poverty emerged and deteriorated, and it has become one of the hottest research topics in the disciplines like sociology, demography, geography, urban planning, etc. We found more than 1000 papers, 20 doctoral and master thesis and 15 related books in the disciplines of geography, urban planning and sociology under this topic, and chose 125 papers, 8 thesis and 13 books from all these materials as the key representative ones, based on which we reviewed and evaluated the studies about urban poverty during the last one and half decades in China. Three main sections were included in this paper:In the first part, we started from analyzing the evolvement of urban poverty studies from 1991 to 2004 which indicates that there exits a close linkage between the research and the socio-economic transition, the public policy of social assistance in the country. Then we divide all the papers into four fundamental groups:the studies of process, interaction, action and comprehensive research of urban poverty. We found that the study of process had more than 38 percent of the whole papers, which covers the concepts, the types and the causes of urban poverty. While the comprehensive research, the action research and that of interaction occupied 26 percent, 22 percent, and 14 percent. We have also found that the process was almost the only topic of urban poverty research before the mid 1990s, while the other three joined since 1996.In the second part, under the framework of "process-interaction-action", we reviewed the main viewpoints of the urban poverty research, including the concept, the measuring standard, the characteristics of the poor class, the main reasons for the poverty, and the anti-poverty actions. The concept of urban poverty was developed from economic poverty to comprehensive deprivation. The main characteristics of the poor class were low-income, poor-education and spatially agglomerating in certain areas within cities. Most researchers agreed that urban poverty was caused by the adjustment of the socio-economic structure, the inequality of income distribution and the lagging of the social assistance. Measures, not only in economy and social welfare but also in urban development and urban planning, should be taken for anti-poverty.In the third part, based on the former review, we pointed out the deficiencies in the existing studies. Very little attention has been paid on the urban social space of this special stratum, the relationship between urban development, urban social structure and the urban poor, the demand of this stratum and the fair distribution of urban public resources. We also gave some suggestions for the future research on this topic.
