Abstract: City development has garnered a growing amount of attentions from the academia since it provides the most comprehensive range of realities for implementing sustainable development. Being an interdisciplinary study, economic geography provides an important perspective for urban sustainability research. In order to clarify the research context in this field and improve the scientificity of the literature review, this paper uses bibliometric analysis as the basis for literature review, then analyzes primary social network paths using the Pajek software and the Python programming language and identified 54 studies as the cornerstones forming 4 major paths of the basic research framework in sustainable development. On this basis, this paper identifies and analyzes in depths about 3 hot areas: urban sustainability implications(natural capital), governance system for urban sustainable transformation and sustainable urban space and at last comes up with recommendations for future research direction.