Today, unexpected economic, environmental, and political events are reproducing urban complexities and pushing urban areas towards an unpredictable future. Only with permanent and dynamic management can we keep pace with these changes. Therefore, changing the approach towards the city organization to respond to current and future challenges is vital. Self-organizing cities are considered a new paradigm in the world's urban planning system, a comprehensive, multidimensional, and complex phenomenon based on a framework of new theories. On the other hand, the problems arising from the dispersion of opinions in the literature on the self-organizing city and the lack of consensus on its theoretical definition are doubled when entering the field of the organizational city. Therefore, the purpose of this research is to explain the paradigmatic foundations governing the self-organizing city. To achieve the aforementioned goal, the meta-analysis method based on the PRISMA model has been used to identify and classify the theoretical and paradigmatic self-organizing city (in the initial search, articles from 1944 to 2024 were considered, and 27 articles were selected for analysis after the final screening). The research findings indicate that self-organization originates from three different theories: distributed structure theory, synergy theory, and autopoietic theory, emphasizing different principles including external and internal orientation of the system, and the philosophical dimensions of the urban self-organization theory are inspired by two critical realist and poststructural ontologies, so that these two epistemological perspectives see it beyond positivism and cause-and-effect relationships, a bridge to connect the non-human world and the human world, a space for planning dynamics that is compatible with unforeseen conditions. Therefore, it can be concluded that urban self-organization is a multi-layered process resulting from the interaction of structural forces, local actions, and identity reproduction, and effective urban planning should focus on facilitating and strengthening these capacities.