Abstract: With the rise of the humanistic trends, social and life space was paid more and more attention. Strengthening the research on urban living space will help to improve the life quality of urban residents and accelerate urban space optimization. From the perspective of functional space and ontology, this paper redefined the meaning of urban living space and discussed the new perspective of urban space research. The latest progress in existing researches on social and living spaces at home and abroad was reviewed systematically. It was found that urban living space has become a hot research subject in recent years and the research has ranged from macro to micro areas. Living environment and life quality have become the main contents in the research on urban living space. On the other hand, methods also tend to be diversified. In addition to traditional methods of positivism, humanism, structuralism, some effective new methods also appeared such as behavioral geography, time geography, and cultural ecology and postmodernist method. Combination of macro and micro researches should be paid more attention in the future research. The research on specific type and formation mechanism of urban living spaces should be further strengthened. In order to optimize the structure of urban living space, more planning tools and control mechanisms should be applied.

Key words: prospect, review, urban living space, urban space