Harmonious Development, Common Prosperity and the Transformation of Cities and Regions
- Opening Plenary Session (Dr. George C. S. LIN
Qiushi Chair Professor, Department of Earth Sciences, Zhejiang University; Chair Professor and Associate Dean of Social Sciences, Department of Geography, The University of Hong Kong
) - Opening Plenary Session (Professor Ivan Turok, acting Executive Director in the Economic Performance and Development Unit of the HSRC; Honorary Professor at the Universities of Cape Town and Glasgow)
- Closing Plenary Session (Professor Henry Wai-Chung Yeung, Professor of Economic Geography at the National University of Singapore; Co-Director of GPN@NUS Centre, and Director of the JY Pillay Comparative Asia Research Centre in the NUS Global Asia Institute )
- Closing Plenary Session (Professor Weidong Liu, Professor of Economic Geography and Assistant Director at the Institute of Geographical Sciences and Natural Resources Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China. )
Opening Plenary Session
Dr. George C. S. LIN
Qiushi Chair Professor, Department of Earth Sciences, Zhejiang University; Chair Professor and Associate Dean of Social Sciences, Department of Geography, The University of Hong Kong
George C.S. Lin is Qiushi Chair Professor, Department of Earth Sciences, Zhejiang University and Chair Professor of Geography, Associate Dean (Research) of Hong Kong University’s Faculty of Social Sciences which is currently ranked No. 1 in Asia and the 30th in the world according to The 2012-2013 Times Higher Education World University Rankings. He is the author of Red Capitalism in South China: Growth and Development of the Pearl River Delta (UBC Press, Vancouver, Canada, 1997), Developing China: Land, Politics, and Social Conditions (Routledge, London, 2009), co-author of China’s Urban Space: Development under Market Socialism (Routledge, London, 2007), and over 90 articles published in internationally refereed journals and books. His research interests include China’s urban development and urbanization, land use and land management, the growth of urbanism, rural industrialization and regional development in the Pearl River Delta, transnationalism, cross-border population mobility, and the geography of Chinese diaspora. Professor Lin has served as Chair of the China Geography Specialty Group of the Association of American Geographers (2007-08), Councilor and Vice-Chair of the Economic Geography Commission of the Geographical Society of China since 2006, and Head of the Department of Geography (2006-08). He has been on the editorial boards of international scholarly journals including Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, The Canadian Geographer, Urban Geography, The Chinese Geographical Science, and Eurasian Geography and Economics. He is the recipient of a Young Canadian Researcher Award (IDRC, Ottawa, Canada, 1992); University Teaching Fellow (HKU, 1998), Outstanding Young Researcher Award (HKU, 2002), Qiushi Chair Professorship (Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China, 2014), Zijiang Chair Professorship (East China Normal University, Shanghai, China, 2010), and many competitive research grants from international funding agencies, including the NSF (USA), ESRC (UK), and the Hong Kong Research Grants Council. He has been identified as among the top 50 most cited economic geographers in the English-speaking world over the recent half a century according to age-weighted Scopus h-index and one of the top 1% scholars according to ISI’s Essential Science Indicators in 2009 and once again in 2010, 2011, 2012, and 2013.
Opening Plenary Session
Professor Ivan Turok, acting Executive Director in the Economic Performance and Development Unit of the HSRC; Honorary Professor at the Universities of Cape Town and Glasgow
Professor Ivan Turok is the acting Executive Director in the Economic Performance and Development Unit of the HSRC. He is Honorary Professor at the Universities of Cape Town and Glasgow, and has a PhD in Economics, MSc in Planning and BSc in Geography. Before returning to South Africa and joining the HSRC in 2010 he was Professor and Research Director of the Department of Urban Studies at Glasgow University.
Professor Turok's fields of expertise include the spatial economy (regions, cities and neighbourhoods), local labour markets and economic development. His research on unemployment, regional development, city competitiveness, urban regeneration and spatial inequalities is highly cited internationally. He is a regular expert adviser to the United Nations, OECD, European Commission, SA Government, UK Government and African Development Bank. He is a board member of the Regional Studies Association and is on the editorial board of four international journals.
He has published over 100 academic papers, chapters and books and has a B1 rating from the National Research Foundation. He was the principal author of the 2011 State of South African Cities Report. Other books include the State of English Cities (2006), Changing Cities: Rethinking Urban Competitiveness, Cohesion and Governance (2005), Twin Track Cities (2005), The Jobs Gap in Britain’s Cities (1999) and The Coherence of EU Regional Policy (1997).
Professor Turok has 30 years teaching experience in urban and regional economics, policy analysis and evaluation, local labour markets, economic development, urban regeneration and spatial planning. He has supervised 12 PhDs to successful completion and numerous Masters Students.
Closing Plenary Session
Professor Henry Wai-Chung Yeung, Professor of Economic Geography at the National University of Singapore; Co-Director of GPN@NUS Centre, and Director of the JY Pillay Comparative Asia Research Centre in the NUS Global Asia Institute
Henry Wai-chung Yeung (PhD Manchester) is Professor of Economic Geography at the National University of Singapore since 2005, Co-Director of GPN@NUS Centre since October 2014, and Director of the JY Pillay Comparative Asia Research Centre in the NUS Global Asia Institute since January 2015. His research interests cover economic globalization, global production networks, East Asian firms, and the political economy of development. He was a recipient of the National University of Singapore Outstanding University Researcher Award (1998) and Outstanding Researcher Award (2008). His latest monographs are Strategic Coupling: East Asian Industrial Transformation in the New Global Economy (forthcoming in Cornell Studies in Political Economy Series, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, March 2016) and Global Production Networks: Theorizing Economic Development in an Interconnected World (with Neil Coe, Oxford University Press, Oxford, April 2015). His previous authored books are: Transnational Corporations and Business Networks (Routledge, 1998), Entrepreneurship and the Internationalisation of Asian Firms (Edward Elgar, 2002), Chinese Capitalism in a Global Era (Routledge, 2004), and Economic Geography: A Contemporary Introduction (with Neil Coe and Phil Kelly, Wiley, 2007/2013). He has published another 7 edited books, over 90 academic journal articles, and 45 book chapters. He is Editor of Environment and Planning A and Economic Geography, and serves on 20 other international journals. He is an elected Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences (UK) and a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society-Institute of British Geographers (UK) and the Regional Studies Association (UK).
Closing Plenary Session
Professor Weidong Liu, Professor of Economic Geography and Assistant Director at the Institute of Geographical Sciences and Natural Resources Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China.
Weidong Liu is a full professor in Economic Geography and assistant director at the Institute of Geographical Sciences and Natural Resources Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China. His areas of study are regional development and policies in China, foreign direct investments, spatial impacts of new information and communication technologies, and the changing geography of automobile industry in China. Weidong is the (co-)author of 12 books (one in English) and 150 peer-reviewed journal papers (35 papers in English). He is the chair of the RSA-China Division and the head of the Commission on Economic Geography of the Geographical Society of China.