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THE UNIVERSITY OF HONG KONG
Urban Systems Institute
香港大學城市系統研究院

Abstract Architecture

City Traffic

People

LEADERSHIP

Prof. Peng Gong

Senior Advisor

Prof. Peng Gong

Geography

Geography

Prof. Shenjing He

Executive Deputy Director

Prof. Shenjing He

Urban Planning and Design

Urban Planning and Design

Prof. Bo Huang

Deputy Director

Geography and Resource Management

Geography and Resource Management

Prof. Chris Webster

Senior Advisor

Prof. Chris Webster

Architecture

Architecture

Prof. Anthony Yeh

Senior Advisor

Prof. Anthony Yeh

Urban Planning and Design

Urban Planning and Design

Advisory Board

Prof. P Gong

Prof. Michael Batty

Bartlett Professor of Planning, UCL

Bartlett Professor of Planning, UCL

Chair, Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis

Prof. P Gong

Prof. Fulong Wu

Bartlett Professor of Planning, UCL

Bartlett Professor of Planning, UCL

Prof. P Gong

Prof. Luis Bettencourt

Professor of Ecology and Evolution, UChicago

Professor of Ecology and Evolution, UChicago

Inaugural Director, Mansueto Institute for Urban Innovation

Prof. P Gong

Prof. Mei-Po Kwan

Professor of Geography and Resource Management, CUHK

Professor of Geography and Resource Management, CUHK

Director, Institute of Space and Earth Information Science

Prof. P Gong

Director, Peking University – Lincoln Institute Center for Urban Development and Land Policy

Director, Peking University – Lincoln Institute Center for Urban Development and Land Policy

Prof. P Gong

Prof. Karen Seto

Professor of Geography and Urbanization Science

Professor of Geography and Urbanization Science

Director, Hixon Center for Urban Ecology

RESEARCH FELLOW

I am a mixed-methods researcher who specializes in urban and economic geography. My research seeks to understand the co-evolution of urban regions in advanced economies. Along with some colleagues, I am interested in developing a general theory of urban evolution. My empirical work considers diffusion of regional economic policy among regions and the formation of technological and symbolic clusters.

As A USI research fellow, I hope to collaborate with the Institute’s extensive academic network and discover knowledge and techniques that I can adopt in my teaching.

Dr. Patrick Adler

Geography

Geography

Dr. Shihui Feng

Education

Education

Benjamin Iaquinto is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Hong Kong. His research explores the political and environmental implications of tourism mobilities.
He is an Associate Editor of Tourism Geographies and a Steering Committee member of the Australian Mobilities Research Network. His work has appeared in outlets such as Annals of the American Association of Geographers and Dialogues in Human Geography.

Dr. Benjamin Iaquinto

Geography

Geography

Dr. Weifeng Li's extensive expertise in spatial analysis tools and data analytics techniques enables him to provide new insights into pressing present and future urban problems and effective solutions to address them. He will contribute to the Urban Systems Initiative (USI)'s vision and mission by advancing the science of urban systems and developing novel models that integrate geospatial and sensing data. These models will be applied to address challenges of carbon neutrality and community resilience in the Greater Bay Area and beyond.

Urban Planning and Design

Urban Planning and Design

Leveraging my background in data science, GIS, and robotics, I hope to advance urban sensing capabilities and modeling approaches to generate actionable insights into pressing urban challenges. Through developing novel AI and robotics applications for urban environments, I aim to create innovative solutions that improve economic development, health, education, and sustainability in cities worldwide. My passion for interdisciplinary research at the intersection of technology and urban systems aligns closely with the institute's mission to link urban theorization with policy and industry innovation.

Urban Planning and Design

Urban Planning and Design

My research will contribute to unravelling the evolving forms of cities (USI foremost mission) by modelling urban economic networks, startup-built environment interactions, and housing decisions. These research will provide great potential for multidisciplinary collaborations with earth scientists, data scientists, and sociologists. The future findings will inform urban policies that promote the market integration, urban entrepreneurship, and housing justice in GBA.

Real Estate and Construction

Real Estate and Construction

"As an urban economist, Prof. Kelvin Wong’s research aims to advance the understanding of urban systems through unveiling the economic logic behind the functioning of the real estate market, from housing and land policy to the behavior of developers, property owners, renters, and agents. He is strongly interested in modeling the temporal and spatial patterns of real estate price, liquidity, vacancy, and volatility. He co-invented the repeat-sales property price index in Hong Kong, which became the first tradable housing price index in Asia.
"

Prof. Kelvin Wong

Real Estate and Construction

Real Estate and Construction

I will leverage urban sensing and simulation technologies to develop comprehensive urban models to uncover critical insights into pressing urban and transportation issues. With a focus on urban transportation sustainability, my work will help advance urban systems research and facilitate evidence-based policymaking.

Dr. Xiaohu Zhang

Urban Planning and Design

Urban Planning and Design

Prof. David Bishai

Public Health

Public Health

I'll contribute to USI in four key areas: 1)global urban theory, especially endogenous challenges to dominant conceptualizations of such processes as gentrification, such institutional arrangements as participatory planning, and such topics as urban aesthetics especially in Asia Pacific; 2)experimental methods and methodologies: further development, deployment, replication of my own ‘aesthetic survey’ and the integration of its four component methods for the comparative study of urban neighborhood, as well as novel uses and combinations of cartographica, image capture apparatuses, other multi-sensorial, visual-methods tools, and urban reportage; 3)urban environmental issues: climate governance in comparative perspective, patterns, processes of urban dietary consumption and their implications for urban sustainability; 4) empirical studies with scholastic, policy-facing, broader public relevance: the establishment, maintenance, and promotion of publicly-accessible data sets and archival repositories.

Dr. Ben Alan Gerlofs

Geography

Geography

Dr. Jayson Shi Jia

Business

Business

Humans are challenged by the existential need to halve our ecological footprint by 2050 with an expected increase of 2 billion population. I hope to work on the domed city idea first proposed by Buckminster Fuller.

Mechanical Engineering

Mechanical Engineering

"• I can contribute to novel modelling approaches to urban analysis, including how to extend standard econometric and CGE models to the analysis of spatial and environmental policy.
• I can help strengthen USI’s partnership with international and local policy circles, given the strong relevance of my research projects in climate change and regional development to on-going policy debates.
• I can join USI’s multi-scale modelling initiative and add my expertise in regional science and urban economics, dealing with relatively macro level units of analysis (e.g., city, region, and country). This will create synergy with urban researchers/scientists working on micro-analysis units (e.g., finer grid cells or individual economic agents)."

Dr. Kyung-Min Nam

Urban Planning and Design

Urban Planning and Design

Given my research focus, I could potentially contribute to collaborative efforts at USI by providing conceptual and empirical expertise to research on the political economy of Chinese infrastructure projects in urban settings both within and especially outside of China. I possess a strong understanding of the political economy of Chinese infrastructure and am also experienced in interdisciplinary team-based research. If we are able to identify research questions and approaches of mutual interest, I would be excited to contribute to collaborative efforts to study the domestic and international political economy of Chinese-involved urban infrastructure projects, and hopefully scale this research by pursuing and acquiring external grants that would enable the production of field-leading research.

Dr. Austin Strange

Politics and Public Administration

Politics and Public Administration

Prof. S.C. Wong

Engineering

Engineering

Dr Zhan Zhao’s research interests lie in the intersection of urban transport planning, behavioral science and AI. He contributes to USI’s vision and mission by integrating diverse methods across disciplines to better plan future sustainable, equitable and smart cities.

Urban Planning and Design

Urban Planning and Design

Dr. Bin Chen’s expertise in remote sensing of built and natural environments and human-environment spatiotemporal interaction modeling, and many interdisciplinary research studies he conducted will contribute to both advances and applications in urban systems science.

Landscape Architecture

Landscape Architecture

"Dr. Guo’s research contributes to the applications of urban systems research:
Addressing the dynamic challenges in urban system and their health effects in general population.
Elucidating current and life-course effects of urban environmental factors."

Urban Planning and Design

Urban Planning and Design

Landscape

Landscape

Business

Business

Public Health

Public Health

I am an Assistant Professor and the founding director of Urban Analytics and Interventions Research Lab at the University of Hong Kong. My work focuses on Planning, Transport, and Health. The impacts of large-scale interventions in cities, including the development of new metro lines, large-block gated communities, urban renewal projects, and global street experiments, are profound. I specialise in developing natural experiments to estimate the causal effects of such interventions on social, economic and health outcomes (e.g., physical activity, social inclusion, subjective wellbeing, and housing price). In addition, I am working on institutional analysis of the metro infrastructure provision, using the transportation problem as an empirical question to tackle a larger issue in urban governance and to formulate the informal norm of behaviours in institutions through experimental economics(e.g., survey experiment, game-theoretical experiment). My research established essential urban data, new methodologies and causal evidence to extend the scientific understanding of the outcomes of large-scale transport interventions, contributing to healthy, equitable and adaptive cities.
My research has won several prestigious awards, including the US Lincoln Institute China Program International Fellowship in 2023, three academic awards for research excellence from the UK’s Royal Town Planning Institute (RTPI) in 2019 and 2021, and HKU Research Output Prize in 2021. Moreover, I received Faculty Teaching Award 2022 for my teaching dedication and innovative pedagogy. I am an associate editor of the Journal of Transport & Health.
I hold a PhD in Geoinformation Science from the Inter-Faculty Programme at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (2014). After that, I had four years of research experience as Postdoc Fellow and Research Assistant Professor. I held short-term visiting researcher positions in Transport Studies Unit at University of Oxford (2023), Peking University-Lincoln Center (2023), Faculty of Spatial Planning at TU Dortmund (2021 & 2022), Department of Geography at University of Cambridge (2014), and CGA and Medical School at Harvard University (2013).

Urban Planning and Design

Urban Planning and Design

Frank van der Wouden is an innovation scholar interested in the strategic dimensions of technological change, innovation management, collaboration and economic development in cities. He uses big data approaches and state-of-the-art quantitative methods to generate and communicate insights into complex problems within teams, firms and cities. His research is published in leading international journals, including Research Policy, World Development, Industrial and Corporate Change, Papers in Regional Science, and Industry & Innovation.

Dr. Frank van der Wouden

Geography

Geography

As of one of scholars ranked top 1% worldwide by citations, I hope to continue developing novel theories and modelling approaches for scholars and practitioners to better define, measure, and improve transport/transit systems and spatial development connections, which have long been perplexing and ill-defined.
As the most prolific author for Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space’s featured graphics (now Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science’s featured graphics) hitherto, I also wish to keep producing more innovative graphics to unravel intriguing secrets and stories about urban systems by combining my ever-lasting curiosity, writing skills, and data crunching techniques. "

Dr. Jiangping Zhou

Urban Planning and Design

Urban Planning and Design

Dr. Yi Samuel Chen received his BA in Philosophy and Religion (Hillsdale College, Michigan), his AM/MA (Harvard), and his DPhil/PhD (Oxford) in Near Eastern/Western Asian Languages and Civilisations. His research deals with urban and regional planning and development in relation to state and empire building, currently focusing on ancient Western Asia. His teaching covers urban and planning history more broadly, from the rise of cities as early as the sixth millennium BC in ancient Western Asia to our current age of megacities and megaregions. Prior to joining the University of Hong Kong, he researched and taught at different branches of the University of Oxford, including the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography, Worcester College, and Wolfson College.

Dr. Yi Samuel Chen

History

History

Prof. Guojun He

Business

Business

I aim to develop physics-inspired mathematical and computational methods to advance the modelling of complex networks and the sciences of urban systems. My research draws on fundamental insights from network science, statistical physics, and information theory to extract large-scale patterns in data. These tools can be leveraged to provide a new perspective on a number of challenges facing modern cities, including the spread of epidemics, vehicular congestion, socioeconomic inequality, and ethnoracial segregation.

Dr. Alec Kirkley

Urban Planning and Design

Urban Planning and Design

Prof. George Lin

Geography

Geography

I have systematically investigated the mutually constitutive relationships between urbanisation and the re-organisation of everyday practices, social relations, and cultural identities. I have also contributed to the investigation of alternative spaces, economies, and relations that help ordinary people negotiate the vicissitude of urban changes.

Geography

Geography

Prof. Dragon Tang

Business

Business

Tianren’s expertise is highly relevant to the USI’s development plan to promote interdisciplinary and innovative research activities in urban systems science, particularly through applying cutting-edge technologies (e.g., artificial intelligence and systems modelling) to support spatial decision-making in real practices.

Dr. Tianren Yang

Urban Planning and Design

Urban Planning and Design

Dr Jin Zhu’s research aims to understand the overall performance of the housing system, individuals’ housing pathways, and the impacts on equity and well-being. His policy-oriented research helps identify policy priorities and proposes novel urban interventions.

Real Estate and Construction

Real Estate and Construction

"My specific contribution to USI would be to advance its mission of theorizing the changing spatial forms of urbanization, and the social and ecological implications, drawing primarily on interdisciplinary scholarship in urban political ecology and urban geography/urban studies. My research also seeks to develop policy recommendations for addressing pressing urban challenges, through participatory methodologies. I am also building interdisciplinary collaborations with scholars from HKU and beyond that will use multiple methodological and theoretical approaches to achieve the above goals.
"

Dr. Creighton Connolly

Urban Planning and Design

Urban Planning and Design

Dr. Jianxiang Huang

Urban Planning and Design

Urban Planning and Design

Geography

Geography

Prof. Vivian Lin

Public Health

Public Health

Innovation and Information Management

Innovation and Information Management

Dr. Linwei Tian

Public Health

Public Health

It is my interest to understand the risk and protective factors relating to mental wellness in urban system especially for those which are undergoing rapid change. There is very limited knowledge on the effect of built and social environments on individual’s well-being.
With the increase of urbanization rate, it is important to deploy innovative spatial and temporal methods for monitoring and surveillance such that timely and effectiveness measures can be implemented to promote mental wellness.

Contributions:
1. To examine change of the mental wellness in urban mega hubs.
2. To identify good practice models and promote mental wellness in urban mega hubs

Social Work

Social Work

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