The study of urban China is becoming increasingly significant. China’s astonishing speed of urbanization and large-scale infrastructural investment have left a large carbon footprint at a planetary scale. Its largely state-led and infrastructure-driven mode of development has also attracted much scholarly attention. The CSCC “Urban China” Research Cluster consists of faculty from a wide range of disciplinary backgrounds including urban history, urban anthropology and sociology, urban/regional economics, urban policy, geography, and the study of smart city and sustainability.
Mengqi Wang is an assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Duke Kunshan University. Her research interest covers economic anthropology, urban anthropology, housing, and China. Her book Anxious Homes: Inflexible Demand and China’s Housing Market explores the making of homeownership ideologies in contemporary urban China.
Chen Zhang is an Assistant Professor of Urban Planning and Public Policy at Duke Kunshan University. Her research examines rural-to-urban migration, urbanization, and urban informality in China and India. Her work has appeared in Urban Studies, Housing Studies, Cities, Global Environmental Change, the International Journal of Housing Policy, Transportation Letters, and the Journal of Transport and Land Use. Her book manuscript, The Danger and Power of Being In-Between: Rural-Urban Inbetweener Identity and Community in Contemporary China, is under review at Routledge. She holds a Ph.D. in Urban and Regional Planning from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities.
Coraline Goron is an Assistant Professor of Environmental Policy, Duke Kunshan University. Dr. Coraline Goron obtained a double Ph.D. degree in Political Science from the University of Warwick and the Université Libre de Bruxelles under the aegis of the Erasmus Mundus GEM program. Before joining DKU, Coraline was a postdoctoral research fellow funded by the Wiener-Anspach Foundation at the University of Oxford China Centre.
Keping Wu is Associate Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Duke Kunshan University. Her work explores the effects of urbanization and displacement on the social lives of former villagers, with a focus on aging, mental health, gender and spirituality.
Puyang Li is an interdisciplinary geographer whose research examines human-environment interactions, land systems, and sustainability. His current work on urban China focuses on climate resilience, spatial planning, and urban environmental change, using GIS, remote sensing, and spatial modeling. His broader interests include urban heat, carbon emissions, green space, and the governance of climate adaptation, with particular attention to how environmental risks and planning responses vary across Chinese cities.
Yisu Zhou is Professor of Public Policy and Sociology at Duke Kunshan University. A sociologist of education, he studies educational policy across higher education and K-12 schooling in East Asia, centered on China. His work asks how schools and universities in Chinese cities shape social stratification and mobility, how higher education drives regional development across Greater China, including the Greater Bay Area , and how Chinese universities advance science and technology. He has published in the Studies in Higher Education and International Sociology.