The research is devoted to the analysis of the methodological basis of philological urbanistics. The authors trace the history of formation of scientific problems of urbanistics and analyze trends in the study of the city as an object of research. The article provides a detailed analysis of linguistic methods in a comparatively new direction -philological urbanistics. The possibilities of applying general scientific methods and methods of linguistic research in linguo-communicative environment of the city have been described. Special attention is paid to the perspectives of new approaches to the study of the city, in particular, from the standpoint of general cultural city landscape studies.