Happy Lunar New Year from the USC US-China Institute!
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.
![](https://china.usc.edu/sites/default/files/styles/event_node_featured/public/events/featured-image/weatherhead-pic1_0.jpg?itok=ZWZirsSR)
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.
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