ABSTRACT

The conversion of Earth's land surface to urban uses is one of the most profound human impacts on the global biosphere and the functioning of Earth as a system. Understanding the underlying structure, causal relationship, and feedback interactions between society and urban land-use change is critical for sustainability and human well-being. This Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award will fund research that seeks to advance our understanding of the spatial and temporal patterns of urbanization, the demographic, social-institutional, and economic-political causes of urban land-use change, and the feedbacks of urban land-use change on these processes. Building on a comparative framework already established by the PI, this project will use multiple study sites in China and Vietnam as observational laboratories. Recent political and economic reforms in both countries have spurred impressive rates of economic growth which, in only a few decades, have transformed to new urban areas land that had been dedicated to agriculture for centuries. The research will evaluate urban land-use change in contemporary Chinese and Vietnamese cities as an outcome of the dynamic interaction among government policies, population changes, economic factors, investments and local institutions. First, place-based case studies in both countries will be used to test long-held hypotheses about the fundamental causes of urban land conversion. Second, these studies will be used to develop cross-cutting themes and more general theories regarding the interaction among socioeconomic, political, and economic process and urban land-use change. Third, the strength of these interactions across time and space will be evaluated with the ultimate goal of offering a new paradigm about the human drivers of land-use change that addresses the complexities and feedbacks of social and biophysical processes. The spatial and temporal patterns of urban land-use change will be investigated through satellite remote sensing analysis combined with in-depth interviews and archival research to construct land-use histories. The causes, consequences, and feedbacks of urban land-use change will be explored by examining population migration, economic factors, property rights, and policy reforms. The research will analyze census data, household information, in-depth interviews, and economic data from national compendiums at multiple administrative units. The primary significance of these objectives lies in identifying trends and impacts of multiple social processes and their roles in urban land conversion; developing a cross-scale understanding of the social and biophysical transitions underway and the points at which they interact; and developing theories of land-use change processes beyond individual case studies.

The three educational objectives of the project are to initiate an outreach program with a local school through summer research opportunities, to develop a teaching module on urbanization in Asia that can be used in conjunction with a documentary film that the PI already has created, and to develop and implement a new cross-campus GIS course. The project will offer unique learning and research opportunities for students who are traditionally underrepresented in the sciences across multiple academic levels. The participation of these student communities will be broadened through an outreach and mentorship program with a local school that serves low-income and disadvantaged youths and through active student recruitment at Stanford.

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