Harvard MIT UBC Urban China Conference 2023: Has planning guided China’s urbanization?
When: Monday, March 20th, 2023
Where: Harvard University Campus, Cambridge, MA
Registration Link: https://forms.gle/yBWbEGJMCm2TZmCd9 (Before Dec 15th, 2022)
China’s rapid urbanization has come with a stunning assortment of plans: urban plans, land plans, economic plans, demographic planning, and so forth. At the same time, China’s urbanization has also been characterized by a large amount of activity outside of these plans: informal construction, widespread migration, informal land uses, among others. This conference aims to put research across various aspects of Chinese urbanization into dialogue around a unifying question: To what extent has planning guided China’s urbanization? Have plans driven urban development or have the cities we observe today developed in contravention to—or in compromise with—planning?
This conference brings together scholars conducting cutting-edge research on urban China to learn from and improve one another’s work. The one-day event will feature several themed panels, each including original research presentations, comments from a discussant, and time for engagement with other conference participants. Thanks to the generous support of the MIT Sustainable Urbanization Lab, the School of Community and Regional Planning at UBC and the Harvard Fairbank Center, we are able to offer several modest travel awards (300 USD), competitively selected by the conference organizing committee.
The conference will be held in person on March 20th, 2023 at the Harvard University Campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts. We invite the submission of abstracts by all interested. Please upload an extended abstract (500 words) by December 15th via this form: https://forms.gle/yBWbEGJMCm2TZmCd9. While participants will present one paper each, individuals are welcome to submit multiple abstracts for consideration. Submissions will be screened for quality and completeness. To facilitate in-depth discussion, please note that we require a full draft manuscript by March 1st, 2023.
If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to reach out to Dr. Julia Harten at julia.harten@ubc.ca.
Important Dates:
Abstract Submission December 15th, 2022
Abstract Decisions Mid-January, 2023
Full Paper Submission March 1st, 2023
Confirmed Discussants:
HOU Li, Tongji University
Meg Rithmire, Harvard Business School
Nick Smith, Barnard College, Columbia University
ZHENG Siqi, MIT Center for Real Estate and MIT Sustainable Urbanization Lab
Organizing Committee: Julia Harten, NIE Xuanyi, Saul Wilson, and ZHANG Guanchi