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 out research on and study urban Asia at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Student contributors largely come from my urban Asia courses (GY438 Urban Asia and GY480 Remaking China: Geographical Aspect of Development and Disparity), who have initially produced the blog posts as part of their study assignments. In this regard, this site also serves as the venue for sharing and disseminating the pedagogical outcomes, situating students as knowledge co-producers.

The writings make use of Asia as an empirical terrain to unsettle Western theories and notions of urban development. Various examples of urban policies, practices, and processes are drawn from cities across East and Southeast Asia in particular, aiming to produce critical and evidence-based analyses of the multiple and dynamic urban conditions. It is hoped that this site of public writing could invite as many people as possible to proactively reflect upon our “urban age” in question, with Asia as both an analytic unit and method.

In its eighth year, the blog now has 33 blogs released, including the two that have been published recently as follows:

  • “A flawed participatory approach: Fayuansi Heritage District regeneration in Beijing” by Ziyu Qiao
  • “Rural dreams in urban Shanghai: Confronting the challenges of equal education in a megacity” by Zhiyi Meng

For those who may be interested, the top three blogs in terms of highest views were the following blogs: