Inaugural Harvard MIT UBC Urban China Conference Successfully Held on March 20th, 2023

On March 20th, the Inaugural Harvard-MIT-UBC Urban China Conference took place on Harvard Campus in Cambridge, MA. The conference, themed “Has planning guided China’s urbanization,” featured four panels and 16 speakers and was organized around discussions led by the panel chairs Meg Rithmire (Harvard), Nick Smith (Barnard College), Li Hou (on behalf of the MIT Sustainable Urbanization Lab), and Siqi Zheng (MIT). Participants joined from the U.S., Canada, Europe, and China.

The International Association of China Planning (IACP) sponsored travel awards for four graduate student speakers. The award winners are (from left to right) Shiqi Ma (Cornell), Yu Wang (Cornell), Wenjie Weng (UBC), and Meiqing Li (Berkeley).

The conference was organized by the MIT-UBC-Harvard Urban China Zoom Talk Series team, consisting of Julia Harten (UBC), Li Hou (MIT), Xuanyi Nie (Harvard), Saul Wilson (Harvard and Brown University), Zhang Guanchi (Harvard). Both the talk series and the conference have been generously supported by the MIT Sustainable Urbanization Lab, the School of Community and Regional Planning at UBC, and the Harvard Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies.

Congratulations, Wenjie and Dr. Harten!