Handuo Deng's Academic Website
Welcome! I am currently a PhD candidate at Bartlett School of Planning, UCL. My research focuses on who owns, produces, and transforms space, how their interconnected practices and power dynamics have shaped existing responses to pressing socio-ecological issues, and how this has posed new challenges to effective policy interventions in sustainable urban development.
My PhD research project is about recent shifts in urban development politics and urban governance in China. It draws on Chengdu’s municipal strategy and state actions to integrate ecological initiatives into the overarching goal of urban development. It has extensively investigated the financial orchestrations, institutional reconfigurations, and market and society mobilisation efforts by the state.
My past research projects have accumulated knowledge of and generated insights into how political-economic arrangements in cities have transformed urban spaces and social relationships, with a core inquiry into the diverse, fundamental, and disruptive role of the state. They include (1) spatial implications (e.g. housing market, land use, population distribution) from the changing role of the state, (2) strategic responses to new technologies (e.g. connected-autonomous vehicles, data platforms) and pressing challenges (e.g., urban ecological degradation, climate change), and (3) emerging financial risks, environmental injustice, and social inequalities by these practices.
I am a team member of the China Planning Research Group (CPRG) based at BSP, UCL. When I was an undergraduate at Peking University, China, I was a team member of the NSFC-DFG Sino-German Centre on Urbanization and Locality and the PKU Urban Morphology Research Group and World Heritage Research Centre.
In my free time, I enjoy running, hiking, swimming, reading, and training my voice as a soprano. I particularly like spending time outdoors, in nature. I was a member of several choirs as a pupil and college student but not in any at present. I enjoy academic writing as much as I enjoy travel writing, non-fiction essays, and fiction writing (including a few fan-fictions). Interestingly, I have found that while academic writing faciliates my non-fiction composition, it has been mutually exclusive with my fictional writing time.