Chris Webster

Dean of Faculty of Architecture, University of Hong Kong

Prof. Chris Webster, Dean of the Faculty of Architecture at The University of Hong Kong, trained in urban planning, computer science, economics and economic geography and is a leading urban theorist and spatial economic modeller. He has published over 150 scholarly papers on the idea of spontaneous urban order and received over 25M pounds in grants for research and teaching and learning projects. He was co-editor of Environment and Planning B for ten years. Books include Webster and Lai (2003) Property Rights, Planning and Markets, Cheltenham, Edward Elgar; Glasze, Webster and Frantz, (2006) Private Cities, London, Routledge; Wu, Webster, He and Liu, (2010) Urban Poverty in China, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar; and Wu and Webster (Editors) Marginalisation in Urban China. London: Palgrave McMillan; and Sarkar, Webster and Gallacher (2014) Healthy Cities: Public Health Through Urban Planning. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Professor Webster has five prize-winning academic papers on urban theory. His current research agenda is to establish systematic evidence for the relationship between urban configuration (planned and spontaneous) and individual health. He was PI on a UK ESRC-funded ‘Transformative Research’ project that created 700 built environment morphometrics for each of the 500,000 members of the UK Biobank, the country’s flagship epidemiological study and this has yielded a stream of papers in top tier epidemiology and public health journals including BMJ and The Lancet (Planetary Health). He has been drawn into Smart City debates and research in recent years and is presently on a mission to help re-set the boundaries of urban science as the much-needed academic basis for the smart city technology that is changing the face of urban planning and management. To this end, he is drawing together a multi-disciplinary network of scientists (ecologists, economists, microbiologists, physicists, AI scientists, spatial analysts, engineers, climatologists, psychologists, political scientists and others) to work with designers and planners on projects aimed at increasing the resilience of the world's first 100M city: the polycentric Pearl River Delta urban region, the world's Silicon Valley 2 and China's Greater Bay Area.