University of Glasgow-Nankai University Joint Graduate School

At its core, the programme aims to promote the social scientific understanding of cities.

You will be taught to understand:

• the economic underpinnings of urban and regional development
• the processes and institutions of urban governance
• the relationships between places and urban society.

You will also learn to demonstrate the value of research-based urban analysis and understanding. In this process, you will improve your own research skills.

You will develop an understanding of cities, property markets, institutions and governance. This provides an essential foundation to effective action in the development and management of cities.

To promote effective work across professional boundaries, you will critically appreciate the roles of a range of urban professionals and other stakeholders.

You will understand the importance of research and reflection as a route to successful urban planning innovation.

Graduate attributes

This degree programme equips you for a wide range of opportunities by providing the knowledge and understanding to:

• Critically identify cities as dynamic spaces in the local, national and global economic and political system
• Evaluate the main theories about the uniqueness of cities, their development in time and space, and their particular assets from a social, economic, cultural and environmental perspective
• Contrast and compare urban trends in different regions of the world, together with the drivers of these changes
• Demonstrate a sound understanding of the current urban problems faced by different professions in urban planning and management; as well as city dwellers themselves
• Evaluate environmental sustainability as a concept, with particular reference to the demands and pressures cities place on the natural environment in different regions
• Assess the underpinnings of urban planning theory and how it has shaped urban interventions
• Critique the roles and  functions of planning in cities areas with a view to shaping urban change
• Compare the rationale for, and assess the effectiveness of, different forms of partnership between the public, private and voluntary sectors in implementing urban development and regeneration, and understand the political variations in the urban development processes in different countries.
• Evaluate the relationship between market processes, built form, private and public realm, different development models and patterns of movement
• Assess the economic and financial implications of alternative development strategies and evaluate how best to create high quality places and generate and capture added value for both particular interests and the wider community.

The Programme is taken over two years of full-time study and includes required courses offered by both universities. 

Nankai University courses may include:

• Intermediate Microeconomics
• Intermediate Macroeconomics
• Intermediate Econometrics
• Regional Economics
• Urban Economics
• Regional Economic Issues in China
• English Language training.

University of Glasgow courses may include:

• Global Cities
• City Planning Theory and Practice
• Urban Design and Development
• Real Estate Institutions and Markets
• Research Methods.

You  will also be required to submit a dissertation in both languages. 

Graduates will find that opportunities exist in planning and development agencies, consultancies, property developers, local and regional authorities, regeneration and development agencies and government; and further study at PhD level. 

Academic faculty in Urban Studies are leaders in their fields, and their research quality is amongst the best in the UK. Expertise spans social, economic and physical change in cities, and it uses multi-level approaches to understand the relationships between: housing, labour markets, systems of governance, health, crime, education, real estate, planning and the environment. 

Following undergraduate and initial postgraduate work at the University of Auckland (NZ), and after a period of work in public policy, I completed doctoral research at the University of St Andrews.

I was a Research Associate at Cardiff University prior to joining the University of Glasgow.

Key Publications:

University of Glasgow - Schools - School of Social & Political Sciences - Our Staff - Dr David Waite 

Graeme Young is a Lecturer in Social and Public Policy in the School of Social & Political Sciences. He received his PhD in Politics and International Studies from the University of Cambridge in 2018.

Graeme’s research focuses on the political economy of informal economic activity and explores how political processes, economic institutions, legal and regulatory systems, and urban development projects shape informality in cities in the Global South; how the urban poor experience and respond to state power as they engage in the informal economy; and what the relationship between the informal economy and the state reveals about state power and the political economy of development more generally. Building on his research into informality in Uganda and South Africa, his current book project examines the governance of informal economies as a global phenomenon that is central to understanding the state, the market, and the lives of the urban poor.

Prior to joining the University of Glasgow, Graeme served as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Balsillie School of International Affairs, a Visiting Researcher at the University of Cape Town, and a Scholar in Residence at the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice at the New York University School of Law.

Key Publications:

University of Glasgow - Schools - School of Social & Political Sciences - Our Staff - Dr Graeme Young

I am a Lecturer in City Planning. I have an academic background in Environmental Planning, European Urban Conservation, Education and Creative Media Practice, and my PhD looked at revealing hidden heritage through creative research methods and the role of digital cultural asset mapping in bidding for City of Culture Status. I am a member of the Institute of Historic Building Conservation (IHBC), a chartered town planner (MRTPI), a recognised Historic Environment Service Provider under the IHBC HESPR scheme, and member of the Association of Illustrators.

Key publications

University of Glasgow - Schools - School of Social & Political Sciences - Our Staff - Dr Alison McCandlish 

Prior to joining the University of Glasgow, Dr. John Carnie was a senior lecturer at Oxford Brookes University for 3 years and led the MSc Spatial Planning programme. Before that he was a lecturer at University of Aberdeen for 4 years and was Programme Director for the Master of Land Economy as well as teaching planning and human geography.  John held a number of roles in planning consultancy and local government before working in higher education, including as head of planning for Bidwells in Scotland.

Key publications

University of Glasgow - Schools - School of Social & Political Sciences - Our Staff - Mr Alan Gardner

Amin Kamete is a Senior Lecturer in Spatial Planning in the Department of Urban Studies in the School of Social and Political Sciences. His research interests are in planning theory and practice with a particular emphasis on governmentality, cities, space and power in the context of development planning, development management and planning enforcement practice vis-à-vis informality, marginality, (in)security and sustainability in sub-Saharan Africa.

Before coming to Glasgow, he was a lecturer in planning in the School of Environment, Natural Resources and Geography at Bangor University. A chartered town planner, he did his undergraduate degree at the University of Zimbabwe. Thereafter, he joined the Nordic Africa Institute in Sweden as Research Programme Co-ordinator. He is Programme Director for the following four MSc programmes at the University of Glasgow: City and Regional Planning; City Planning and Real Estate Development; City Planning and Regeneration; and International Planning Studies.

Key publications

• Kamete, A. (2013) Missing the point? Urban planning and the normalisation of ‘pathological’ spaces in southern Africa.Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 38 (4). pp. 639-651. ISSN 0020-2754 (doi:10.1111/j.1475-5661.2012.00552.x)
• Kamete, A.Y. (2012) Interrogating planning's power in an African city: time for reorientation? Planning Theory, 11 (1). pp. 66-88. ISSN 1473-0952 (doi:10.1177/1473095211419116)

Jihong Ding gained her  M.A. in Economics at Nankai University in 1991 and thereafter studied at the State University of New York at Buffalo, USA, where she gained an M.A. in Economics, an MSc in Computer Science, and a PhD in Economics. She has been an Associate Professor in the School of Economics at Nankai since 2003. She worked as a research scientist with Cymfony Inc in the USA from 2001-03 and has a Graduate Assistant at the State University of New York at Buffalo 1997-2001.

Current research interests include Health Economics, Economic Growth and Development, and Social Insurance.

Key publications

• Ding, J., Ying and Du, Research on consumer behavior of Chinese rural household,Financial Research, Vol 10, 2013 , p.154-166
• Ding, J. and Y. Nian, Analysis of the relationship between economic growth and environmental pollution, Nankai Economic Research, Vol. 2, 2010, p.64-79
• Ding, J. and M. Zhu, A Theoretical Investigation of the Reformed Public Health Insurance in Urban China, Frontiers of Economics in China, 4(1): 1-29, 2009

Chunyuan Huang is an Associate Professor in the Department of International Economics and Trade in the College of Economics at Nankai University. She did both her B.A. and PhD in Economics at Nankai University.

From August 2012-13, she was a Senior Visiting Scholar of Seoul National University, and from January to December in 2014, she taught three economics courses in English at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels at the University of Texas at San Antonio where she was the first global Senior Scholar of the Confucius China Study Plan, organized by China Confucius Institute Headquarters.

Her research is focused on the World Economy, International Trade, Regional Economic Integration, and the Chinese Economy. In 2012, she was awarded first prize in the University Teachers’ Teaching Contest of Tianjin. She was a twice-weekly commentator from 2012-13 on the Korean economy for China Central Television.

Key publications

Translation works:

• Chunyuan Huang. (2011). International economics (Steven Husted, Michael Melvin 8th Edition), China Machine Press

Journal Papers:

• Gang Gong, Chunyuan Huang, Qiancheng Zhang, Weitao Chen, Liangliang Zhao. (2013). From technological introduction to independent R&D, the growth mode of Chinese economy in the new era, Economic Perspectives, Vol. 5. 2013(10).
• Chunyuan Huang, Zhenmei Chen. (2013). The political economic motivation of US to return Asia Pacific in the process of East-Asia regional economic cooperation, Korea-China Social Science Study. Vol. 4. 

Zhang Zhi-Qiang has been an Assistant Professor in the School of Economics at Nankai University since 2010. He gained his PhD in Economics at Nankai in 2009, having done a B.A. in Business Administration and a Masters in Regional Economics at the Inner Mongolia University.

His research interests are in Agglomeration Economics and Urban Spatial Structure; New Economic Geography; and the Theory and Application of Spatial Econometrics. He is the Principal Investigator in a number of research projects, including: “Financial Development, Research and Development and the Development of New Emerging Industry of Tianjin”; Agglomeration Economics and the Optimisation of Spatial Structure of the Urban System of China.

Key publications

• The Scheme of Spatial Weight and the Efficiency of Spatial Econometrics Estimators - from Macro and Micro Data Perspective, Journal of Quantitative and Technical Economics, 2014,6, (forthcoming) (in Chinese) (CSSCI)
• Financial Development, R&D and the Materialization of Regional Productivity, Journal of Economic Review, 2012,3 (In Chinese) (CSSCI)
• Agglomeration and Chinese Urban Economic Growth - Empirical Test Based on Dynamic Panel Data, Social Science of Nanjing, 2010.10, (in Chinese) (CSSCI)

Yue Li has been an Associate Professor in the School of Economics at Nankai University and Director of the Taiwan Research Association in Tianjin since 2009. Her specific research interests are the “Growth and Development Economics” and “Taiwan Economics, Cross-Strait Economic Co-operation”.

Dr Li completed her B.A., Masters and PhD in Economics at Nankai University; she was a Visiting Scholar at UC Berkeley in California from August 2012 to September 2013 and was an exchange students from March 2007 to March 2008 at Waseda University in Tokyo.

Key publications

• Empirical Study on Taiwan's Escaping the Middle-Income Trap and Its Experience Reference for Chinese Mainland, Taiwan Studies, 2014(5).
• Middle-income Trap, Structural Transformation Ability and Government Macroeconomics Effect, The Journal of World Economy, 2013(1).

Hongmei Zhao is a member of the Institute of Statistics and Econometrics in Nankai University’s School of Economics. She gained her PhD in Economics – on “The Effect of Productivity on Inflation and Unemployment” – at University College Dublin in 2004 and her B.A. in International Economics from Hebei University in Baoding City, China.

Dr Zhao was a Teaching Assistant in the Department of Economics at University College Dublin and has been an Associate Professor at Nankai since 2005. Her research focus has been on “the application of structural VAR model in the study of GDP growth rate in China”; forecasting China’s vehicle stock and the relationship between economic variables and vehicle sales.

Key publications

• Measuring the NAIRU — A structural VAR approach, Frontiers of Economics in China, first author，Volume 6, issue 1 (2011) P76-91.
• The Medium and Long Term Forecast of China’s Vehicle Stock per 1000 Person Based on the Gompertz Model, Journal of Industrial technological Economics, first author, issue 225 (2012) P7-24.
• The Study of Influencing Factors for the Demand of Property Insurance in China -- Based on the Regional-weighted And Time-weighted Panel Data, Insurance Studies, first author, issue 298 (Feb, 2013) P38 – 45.

Xuelian Gao is an Associate Professor in the School of Economics at Nankai University, where she gained her PhD in 2004. She graduated with an M.A. in Regional Economics at Zhenzhou University in 2001.

Her research is focused on Regional Economics and Public Economics and Politics. She is currently Principal Investigator on a research project examining “How to cultivate the public environment of new-emerging industrial clusters” and a “Study on the infrastructure and public services in Chinese co-ordinative urban-rural development”. She has been teaching the Masters-level course “Real Estate Economics” since 2008. From 2013-14 she was a Visiting Scholar at Aichi University of Japan.

Key publications

• Xuelian Gao. (2007). The form and development of spatial industrial configuration in Metropolis, Economic Science Press,
• Xuelian Gao and Bo Zhou. (2009). Policy Evaluation., Standards Press of China