Supercities and Mega-Migrations: China's Urban Futures

Weatherhead East Asian Institute at Columbia University hosts the third annual conference on changing landscape of urban spaces.

By 2025, China is expected to have 15 super-cities with an average population of 25 million. Europe will have none. This conference aims to bring together scholars and practitioners from a variety of fields to develop a fuller, interdisciplinary view of the migration flows and rapidly transforming spaces that are revolutionizing China.

"The annual influx of rural migrants to China's cities increased from 9 million in 1989, to nearly 30 million a decade later... there were some 25 million migrant workers in China's cities in the mid-1980s, and about 70 million 10 years later. By 2003, the floating population was double this figure and it remains in the neighborhood of 140 million people-fully 10% of China's total population"

• Thomas Campanella, The Concrete Dragon. China's Urban Revolution and What it Means for the World, 2008

Event Schedule:

10:00-11:30: Migrations: Post-Economic Crisis Patterns and Potentials

Chair: Saskia Sassen, Robert S. Lynd Professor of Sociology, and co-Chair, Committee on Global Thought, Columbia University

Thomas Buettner, Assistant Director, Chief, Population Studies Branch, UN Population Division/DESA and Sabine Henning, Population Affairs Officer, UN Population Division/DESA

Yao Lu, Assistant Professor of Sociology, Columbia University

Ming Yan, Professor, Institute of Sociology and Center for Social Policy Studies, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences

11:30-1:00: Super-Cities: Green and Smart? 

Chair: Vishaan Chakrabarti, Marc Holliday Associate Professor of Real Estate Development and Chair of Real Estate Development Program, Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, Columbia University

Xuefei Ren, Assistant Professor of Sociology and Global Urban Studies; Michigan State University; Woodrow Wilson International Center Fellow (2011-2012)

Parag Khanna, Senior Fellow, New America Foundation, and Ayesha Khanna, Director, Hybrid Reality Institute

Shohei Shigematsu, Partner, Director of OMA New York

2:00-3:30: "The Super City" and the "Right to a Slum"

Chair: Saskia Sassen

Gracia Liu-Farrer, Associate Professor, Graduate School of Asia-Pacific Studies, Waseda University

Ling Huang, Associate Professor, Department of Urban Planning, Faculty of Architecture & Urban Planning, Chongqing University

Adam Greenfield, Managing Director, Urbanscale
Craig Hartman, Partner, Skidmore, Owings and Merrill LLP

3:30-5:00: Architecture + Environment

Chair: Ioanna Theocharopoulou, Assistant Professor, School of Constructed Environments, Parsons the New School for Design

Jiang Xu, Assistant Professor, Department of Geography and Resource Management, The Chinese University of Hong Kong

Xiangming Chen, Director of the Center for Urban and Global Studies and Raether Professor of Sociology and International Studies, Trinity College and Chang Liu, Student Researcher, Center for Urban and Global Studies, Trinity College

Ackbar Abbas, Professor, Comparative Literature, School of Humanities, UC Irvine

Douglas Wyatt Hocking, Principal, Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates PC

Concluding Words: Saskia Sassen

No registration required.