Research Interests

• Urban development politics and the role of the state

  They include critical reflections on the end of neoliberal urban entrepreneurialism amongst a global rising role of the state in urban governance, as documented by state entrepreneurialism and new state capitalism. How the territorial logic of national states facing geopolitical dynamics and the capitalist logic of sustaining accumulation have co-shaped urban spaces is a core inquiry. These new power dynamics and effects are crucial because they have influenced the forms and mechanisms of socioeconomic inequalities and environmental injustice, both in disgraceful expansion nowadays.

• Spatial implications and materialities of changing governance

  They include how local state behaviour directly reshaped urban spatial structure, how state-orchestrated financial operations have produced large-scale ecological spaces and new landscape which have signifianct impact on decarbonisation and climate adapatation, and how the private-owned data platforms generated by new technologies such as connected-and-autonomous vehicles have transformed spatial materialities.

• Resilient regions and communities in the face of socio-ecological crises

  Built upon the explorations above, new responses and solutions may be generated, especially strategic plans and actions, to tackle with the pressing socio-ecological issues and new precarity by new technologies.