Welcome to my blog! My name is Neil, and this space will catalog some of my experiences in China this summer, working with the Peking University-Lincoln Institute (PULI) Center for Urban Development and Land Policy in Beijing, as a Cultural Bridge Fellowship at the Women and Public Policy Program at the Harvard Kennedy School. This here is an old picture of "your author":
I'll be looking at the urban and spatial development of China's metropolitan areas, with a specific focus on gender equity in public mass transit access. I'll be interviewing scholars, officials, planners, anthropologists, activists, hopefully some straphangers, and practitioners in key organizations in Chinese cities, with a particular emphasis on Beijing, Shanghai, and Hong Kong. My research will be part of PULI's ongoing work on urban accessibility in China.
I'd like to express my deepest thanks to the Women and Public Policy Program (WAPPP) at the Harvard Kennedy School for kindly awarding me the Cultural Bridge Fellowship that's supporting my research in China this summer.
I've been very interested in China's rapid scale of urban development for a while now. China's growth is important not only because of the country’s large population and rate of urbanization, but also because China has been exporting elements of its own urban planning models to other parts of the developing and developed worlds.
I recently helped organize an event with the Ash Center for Democratic Governance on the growth of Chinese cities, in which Harvard Business School's Prof. Meg Rithmire spoke about how China is following America's debt-financed model of suburban, car-dependent development.
In addition to challenges of pollution---I've been warned to carry a face mask in Beijing---this model, as it worked in other countries, has been problematic for more than half of the population in particular: women. The spatial expansion of cities meant a physical disconnect between (middle and working class) women and socio-economic opportunities and an attendant psychological, social, and economic void---a problem that the American media tried to gloss over with a "feminine mystique," the idea that women were naturally fulfilled by defining themselves in relation to their husbands, sons, and families, that Betty Friedan exposed.
Perhaps more poignantly, we've seen the follies of this low-density, single-use design on the streets of New Delhi, India, where recently and infamously, a young woman was viciously raped and killed in a darkly lit, sparsely populated area with no witnesses. Spatial design issues like access to public transit, lighting, mixed-use density all heavily implicate women’s safety, social access, economic mobility. And as I'll try to argue throughout this summer, this is not just a problem for women; it is a problem for all of society.
So we'll see how China is doing on that front this summer. Please stay tuned. This should be a really interesting summer!
I'll be looking at the urban and spatial development of China's metropolitan areas, with a specific focus on gender equity in public mass transit access. I'll be interviewing scholars, officials, planners, anthropologists, activists, hopefully some straphangers, and practitioners in key organizations in Chinese cities, with a particular emphasis on Beijing, Shanghai, and Hong Kong. My research will be part of PULI's ongoing work on urban accessibility in China.
I'd like to express my deepest thanks to the Women and Public Policy Program (WAPPP) at the Harvard Kennedy School for kindly awarding me the Cultural Bridge Fellowship that's supporting my research in China this summer.
I've been very interested in China's rapid scale of urban development for a while now. China's growth is important not only because of the country’s large population and rate of urbanization, but also because China has been exporting elements of its own urban planning models to other parts of the developing and developed worlds.
I recently helped organize an event with the Ash Center for Democratic Governance on the growth of Chinese cities, in which Harvard Business School's Prof. Meg Rithmire spoke about how China is following America's debt-financed model of suburban, car-dependent development.
In addition to challenges of pollution---I've been warned to carry a face mask in Beijing---this model, as it worked in other countries, has been problematic for more than half of the population in particular: women. The spatial expansion of cities meant a physical disconnect between (middle and working class) women and socio-economic opportunities and an attendant psychological, social, and economic void---a problem that the American media tried to gloss over with a "feminine mystique," the idea that women were naturally fulfilled by defining themselves in relation to their husbands, sons, and families, that Betty Friedan exposed.
Perhaps more poignantly, we've seen the follies of this low-density, single-use design on the streets of New Delhi, India, where recently and infamously, a young woman was viciously raped and killed in a darkly lit, sparsely populated area with no witnesses. Spatial design issues like access to public transit, lighting, mixed-use density all heavily implicate women’s safety, social access, economic mobility. And as I'll try to argue throughout this summer, this is not just a problem for women; it is a problem for all of society.
So we'll see how China is doing on that front this summer. Please stay tuned. This should be a really interesting summer!
