Biography — Weiping Wu

Prof Weiping Wu Member, Lee Kuan Yew World City Prize Nominating Committee Vice Provost for Academic Programs, Professor and Director of Urban Planning Programme, Columbia GSAPP USA

Weiping Wu is Vice Provost for Academic Programs, Professor and Director of the Urban Planning programs at Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. She served as Interim Dean of the School during spring and summer 2022. At Columbia, 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, Professor 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 urbanisation 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 book The Chinese City (now in second edition). It offers a critical understanding of China’s urbanisation, 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 beyond the university setting. Currently, she is on the Planning Accreditation Board (PAB), which accredits university programmes 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 programmes 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 a member of the International Advisory Board for the Urban China Research Network and a member of the Hong Kong Research Grants Council’s Humanities and Social Sciences panel, as well as serving on the editorial board of four journals. She is an editor of the SAGE Handbooks of Modern China series. In addition, she has provided consultation to the Ford Foundation, Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, and World Bank.

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