I am deeply honoured and thrilled to announce that I have been elected as a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences (AcSS). This prestigious recognition celebrates my contributions to the social sciences and affirms the impact of my work in advancing the field. Link: https://acss.org.uk/news/the-academy-of-social-sciences-welcomes-64-leading-social-scientists-to-its-fellowship/ As part of this distinguished fellowship, I join 63 […]
A little before the Covid-19 pandemic, I experimented with a new mode of teaching assessments that involved the writing of academically informed but public-facing blogs. Some of the exemplary pieces have been released on this teaching blog, https://urbanasia.blog. The site, https://urbanasia.blog, is designed for educational purpose to share primarily the writings of students who carry […]
At the end of 2024, I was very pleased to see the publisher proofs of a forthcoming book that I co-edited with Dr Dong-Wan Gimm, entitled The Political Economy of Megaprojects in Asia: State power, Land Control, Financial Flows, and Dispossession and to be published by Routledge. More details about the book and its table […]
As we approach the end of 2024, I want to take a moment to express my heartfelt gratitude to all who have kindly and generously reached out and supported me. This year has been particularly challenging for me and for my family, and the complexities of ongoing geopolitical and domestic political affairs do not make […]
“Tens of millions of empty urban homes in #China & still a very large population of rural smallholders…yet people are not moving off their rural land…” It was my pleasure to be part of this expert panel chaired by Dr Jane Hayward at Lau China Institute, KCL, on 17 October 2024 as part of its […]
Yesterday marked the end of my five-year directorship of LSE Saw Swee Hock Southeast Asia Centre. They were enjoyable, exciting and fulfilling years, and I was fortunate to have met thousands of people on various occasions. The attached blog is a summary reflection on my five years. I set out to make the centre more […]
Recently learnt our #Planetary#Gentrification book (Polity Press, 2016) is now out in Simplified Chinese, published by China Architectural Industry Press (中国建筑工业出版社). Yi Jin, my former PhD student and currently based at Nanjing University (Sociology), has kindly secured a few copies for me (see his image attached), and I can’t wait to open them. It’s good […]
Here is an online seminar taking place on 20 March 2023 together with Prof Jonathan Rigg at the University of Bristol. We consider the challenges of publishing in international journals and what steps to take for disseminating one’s research findings to the international audience.
This talk on 2 March is practically the first invited talk I am giving in 2023. It’s going to be on “smart cities as the urban utopia”, and I will be introducing the case of Songdo City, while the other panelist would speak about Ecuador’s Yachay City of Knowledge. It’s been a long while since […]
Pleased to see the release of a special issue from Urban Geography, entitled Urbanising Dynamics of Global China. This special issue was co-edited with Yimin Zhao and Sin Yee Koh, and engages with highly interesting cases from Malaysia, India, Ghana and western China. It’s a collection that results from the previous discussions we had at the RC21 conference in Delhi in September 2019.