Taking CNKI and Web of Science from 2000 to 2019 as data sources, the study explores and prospects the human settlements in China and other countries by using CiteSpace's bibliometrics, visual analysis and content analysis. The research shows that: topic evolution, the research on human settlements in China and other countries has shown a fluctuating growth with a stage-type leap, the research topics mainly originate from urban problems and gradually expand to the level of policy making and urban planning, from the original planning to the development of diversified subjects. The integration of interdisciplinary subjects has become an important feature of the subject development of human settlements; the research hotspots of human settlements abroad are mainly in the fields of environment, city, climate change, etc. In China, most of them focus on the environment of human settlements, urban and rural areas, urbanization, etc. Sustainable development is a common attribute of human settlements research in China and other countries. Multi-source new data and integrated new methods give more possibilities to the study of human settlements in the new era. In the future, it is expected to organically integrate quantitative geography, spatial geography, data geography and other emerging disciplines research methods based on geographic big data, remote sensing image data, "big + small data" and other multi-source data, deeply learning and researching the pseudo-human settlements, the principal part of human settlements and beautiful human settlements.
