Speaker: Leonardo Ramondetti, Post-doctoral Researcher, Politecnico di Torino Since the early 2000s, China has seen unprecedented urban growth, spreading to every corner of the country. Driven by the urban entrepreneurialism of major municipalities until the mid-2000s, the reins have since passed to the central and regional administrations which plan development in a more comprehensive and […]

Speaker: Yang Yuzhen, Professor of Architecture and Urban Development, School of Architecture and Urban Planning, Chongqing University ***This talk will be in Mandarin.*** Modern public spaces in Chinese cities have undergone significant changes over the past century. The transformation of Chongqing, an inland city, is an essential part of China's modernization process from east to […]

Speaker: Rosealea Yao , Senior Analyst, Gavekal Dragonomics China’s property-market slump worsened in 2023. The burst of pent-up demand that followed the reopening from Covid containment evaporated by April, and sales deteriorated until tentatively stabilizing in August. Rosealea assesses the outlook for the property sector and risks for developers going forward, as well as the policy response and […]

Speaker: Fang Xu , Continuing Lecturer, Interdisciplinary Studies Program, University of California Berkeley The transformation of Shanghai into a global city has driven millions of Shanghainese away from the urban core; and turned both the historic urban Shanghai and its newly urbanized periphery into a manifestation of the “China Dream”. Shanghai has also experienced the […]

Speaker: Jesse Rodenbiker, Associate Research Scholar, Princeton University; Assistant Teaching Professor of Geography, Rutgers University. Rodenbiker's new book Ecological States critically examines ecological policies in the People's Republic of China to show how campaigns of scientifically based environmental protection transform nature and society. While many point to China's ecological civilization programs as a new paradigm […]

Speaker: Shaun SK Teo, Assistant Professor, Department of Geography, National University of Singapore Is Chinese urbanization unique? What can we learn from Chinese urbanization? How might cases in urban China be integrated into global discussions on urban governance and transformation? This talk addresses these burning questions. Chinese urbanization presents rich cases for an engaged pluralism […]

Speaker:  Zhang Qinghua, Peking University This talk delves into the impact of within-city administrative border adjustments on individual firm productivity and local economic development. Employing a unique quasi-natural experiment conducted in China since the 1990s, the empirical analysis reveals that district border adjustments have a significant positive effect on the TFP of manufacturing firms in the […]

Speaker:  Margaret Hillenbrand, Professor of Modern Chinese Literature and Culture; Fellow of Wadham College, Oxford University On the evening of November 18th, 2017, a blaze broke out in a two-story building in Xinjian urban village, just outside Beijing’s sixth ring road. At least 19 people, including 8 children, died in the flames. Using fire safety […]

Speaker:  Cole Roskam, Professor of Architectural History, Department of Architecture, University of Hong Kong Beginning in the 1970s and intensifying during the 1980s, the People’s Republic of China initiated international scholarly exchange programs with numerous countries at a range of levels and scales within Chinese society. These interactions were intended to facilitate knowledge transfer, particularly […]

Speaker:  Zhu Fangsheng, Assistant Professor of Sociology, Duke Kunshan University This talk will trace the origins and consequences of how contemporary Chinese cities govern public school admissions. School districts became the central device in public school admissions in China, despite their absence of fiscal or administrative foundations. I argue that cities repurposed school districts to […]

Speaker:  Isabella Jackson, Assistant Professor in Chinese History, Trinity College Dublin The Shanghai International Settlement was the site of key developments of the Republican period: economic growth, rising Chinese nationalism, and the Sino-Japanese conflict. Managed by the Shanghai Municipal Council (SMC, 1854–1943), it was beyond the control of both the Chinese and the foreign imperial […]

Speaker:  Zhang Guanchi, Vermont Law and Graduate School How has the rescaling of the city territories interacted with China’s political and economic transformation? During the country’s rapid industrialization and urbanization, Chinese cities have exhibited a relatively low degree of territorial fragmentation. This study examines the institutional experiments that have reclassified, redivided, and recombined local government territory in […]