Welcome to Read Cities!
I am Yimin Zhao, an urban geographer with research expertise in critical urban studies and the spatial politics of urban change. My research mainly explores urban peripheries and the state in China and Asia through the analytical lenses of language, materiality, and everyday life. I am an editor of City and a corresponding editor of the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research. Before joining Durham, I was an Assistant Professor in Urban Planning and Management at Renmin University of China (2018-2024). I also held an SNSF Swiss Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Department of Geography at the University of Zurich (2023).
My current research focuses on three themes: the transformation of urban peripheries, the political economy of urbanism and Global China, and the spatial politics of urban control. The first research stream looks into changing spatio-temporalities of the urban transformation, particularly how the urban has been produced on the dynamic peripheries of Asian cities. The second line of inquiry takes China as method to examine how and how far “Chinese urbanism” has been produced “glocally.“ Interrogating the diverse ways in which this urbanism has been facilitated in different spaces and times, such investigation paves the way for further evaluation of the urban mechanisms of global China. More recently, after witnessing the intense deforming of the “urban“ in Chinese cities, I have been developing the third line of research on the logic of control in authoritarian urbanism.
In addition to research, teaching and writing, I have also been promoting critical urban studies for the general public through a WeChat Official Account: UrbanSense (城识). For details, please scan the QR code below.
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