Planning Inclusive Cities: Working with the Revealed Spatial Preferences of Urban Migrants in Asia

Even in centrally planned cities, informal markets reveal the housing demand preferences not being served by either public policy or formal markets. Dr. Kim distills lessons for a more inclusive city planning paradigm from her research of rural to urban land use conversions in Ho Chi Minh City, Beijing’s subterranean housing market, and Shanghai’s overcrowded housing units market. 

Annette Kim is Associate Professor at the University of Southern California’s Price School of Public Policy. She also directs SLAB, the Spatial Analysis Laboratory, that advances the visualization of the social sciences for public service. Her research experiments with critical cartography and spatial ethnography to re-conceptualize contemporary urbanism and find more inclusive and humane ways to design and govern the 21st century city. Her books include Learning to be Capitalists: Entrepreneurs in Vietnam’s Transition Economy (Oxford University Press, 2008) and Sidewalk City: Re-Mapping Public Space in Ho Chi Minh City (University of Chicago Press, 2015). She received her Ph.D. in urban planning from UC Berkeley, Masters in Public Policy from Harvard University, and was a professor at MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning for ten years.