Weiping Wu

Global urbanization, migration, housing, and infrastructure of Chinese cities

Weiping Wu is Professor of Urban Planning at Columbia GSAPP and Director of Urban Planning programs. She also is on the faculty of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute and Columbia Population Research Center. Before joining Columbia in 2016, she was Professor and Chair in the Department of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning at Tufts University.

Trained in architecture and urban planning, Prof. Wu has focused her research and teaching on understanding urban dynamics in developing countries in general and China in particular. She is an internationally acclaimed urban and planning scholar working on global urbanization with a specific expertise in issues of migration, housing, and infrastructure of Chinese cities. Her publications include nine books, as well as many articles in top international journals. Her published work has gained an increasing public presence, particularly her recent books China Urbanizing and The Chinese City. The latter offers a critical understanding of China’s urbanization, exploring how the complexity of Chinese cities both conforms to and defies conventional urban theories and experience of cities elsewhere around the world.

Professor Wu has had a number of academic leadership roles outside of the university setting. Currently, she is the Chair of the Planning Accreditation Board (PAB), which accredits university programs in North America leading to bachelor’s and master’s degrees in urban and regional planning. She was the President of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning (ACSP) in 2017-2019, a consortium of university-based programs offering credentials in urban and regional planning, with more than 100 full-member schools in North America. Between 2008 and 2012, she was an editor of the Journal of Planning Education and Research, ACSP’s flagship journal. She has been the series editor for the SAGE Modern China Handbooks and a member of the International Advisory Board for the Urban China Research Network, as well as serving on the editorial board of five journals. In addition, she has provided consultation to the Ford Foundation, Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, and World Bank.

PUBLICATIONS

BOOKS

Wu, Weiping, and Qin Gao, eds. China Urbanizing: Impacts and Transitions. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022.

Wu, Weiping, and Piper Gaubatz. The Chinese City. New York: Routledge, 2013 (first edition) and 2021 (second edition).

Wu, Weiping, and Mark Frazier, eds. The SAGE Handbook of Contemporary China. London: Sage, 2018.

Wu, Weiping, Dongquan Li, Michael Hibbard, Yumin Ye, and Lei Zhang, eds. Urbanism and Urban Planning at Many Scales: Selections from Recent North American Planning Scholarship (多维尺度下的城市主义和城市规划: 北美城市规划研究最新进展). Beijing: China Architecture and Building Press, 2011.

Yusuf, Shahid, Simon J. Evenett, and Weiping Wu, eds. Facets of Globalization: International and Local Dimensions of Development. Washington, D.C. : World Bank, 2001.

Yusuf, Shahid, Weiping Wu, and Simon J. Evenett, eds. Local Dynamics in a Globalizing World. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Wu, Weiping. Pioneering Economic Reform in China’s Special Economic Zones: The Promotion of Foreign Investment and Technology Transfer in Shenzhen. Brookfield: Ashgate, 1999.

Yusef, Shahid, and Weiping Wu. The Dynamics of Urban Growth in Three Chinese Cities. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.