Ventilation corridor is crucial to the improvement of urban climate adaptation and the quality of the human environment. A review is helpful to promote the systematic organization of urban ventilation corridor research. Previous review studies have focused on the theoretical framework, practice cases, and planning codification of ventilation corridors, with little attention to their construction methods and effect dimensions. First, this paper summarized the conceptual connotation, systematic composition and research progress of urban ventilation corridors and pointed out their association with the urban wind environment. Second, the study illustrated the construction methods of urban ventilation corridors at micro and macro scales, respectively. The micro-scale method was based on the observation of the current or simulated airflow, including the field measurement method, wind tunnel experiment method, and computational fluid dynamics (CFD) method. The macro-scale approach was based on the measurements of ventilation paths via spatial morphology indicators, which included three steps: the selection of architectural morphology indicators, the construction of the evaluation system, and the generation of spatial paths. Third, the study provided an overview of the effect dimensions, control measures, and planning practices of urban ventilation corridors. We pointed out that the effect dimensions mainly included wind diversion, cooling and haze removal, the control measures were based on the indicator warning method, and the planning practices were characterized by local adaptation. Furthermore, future research could combine circuit theory with new methods and models for constructing ventilation corridors, broaden the dimensions of ventilation corridor effects from low-carbon or health aspects, and try to utilize a multidisciplinary approach to deal with the contradictory controversies that still exist in ventilation corridor research.