Unsupervised learning (UL) has a long and successful history in untangling the complexity of cities. As the counterpart of supervised learning, it discovers patterns from intrinsic data structures without crafted labels, which is believed to be the key to real AI-generated decisions. This paper provides a systematic review of the use of UL in urban studies based on 140 publications. Firstly, the topic, technique, application, data type, and evaluation method of each paper are recorded, derivi...