Professional Affiliation

Associate Professor of Geography and Global Urban Studies, Michigan State University.

Expert Bio

Guo Chen (Ph.D. in Geography, Pennsylvania State University) is an Associate Professor at the Department of Geography, Environment, and Spatial Sciences, with a joint appointment at the Global Urban Studies Program, Michigan State University. Her areas of expertise are urban and economic geography, inequality and poverty, housing, and urbanization in China, emerging countries, and the Asia-Pacific. Her publications (close to forty journal articles and book chapters) focus on interpreting urban China’s landscape of poverty, inequality, and socio-environmental injustice. She also co-edited Locating Right to the City in the Global South (Routledge 2013) and “Interrogating unequal rights to the Chinese city”, a special issue for Environment and Planning A. Her forthcoming books and creative project will focus on documenting China’s urban poverty and hidden slums. Her work has been funded by the National Geographic Society, the National Science Foundation-DDRI, the National Natural Science Foundation of China, Urban China Research Network, and MSU.

Wilson Center Project

“Moving Slums: China’s Hidden Urban Realities and Beyond”

Project Summary

This project takes a step further from the field data collected in Beijing’s “Dharavi” (migrant “enclaves” characterized by their businesses) and other types of proto-slums to a conceptualization and theorization of China’s moving slums and the hidden reality of this urban phenomenon over the last several decades. Specifically, this project will provide significant last-stage funding and time release to enable the compilation and triangulation of the visual, qualitative and quantitative data collected, and the writing of a monograph on China’s hidden moving slums in a comparative context.

Major Publications

The Hidden Slum: A Documentary (Forthcoming)

Urbanization and Income Inequality in Post-Reform China. PLoS ONE, Volume 11, Issue 7: e0158826, 2016.

“Interrogating Unequal Rights to the Chinese City” Special Issue (coedited with He, S.) Environment and Planning A, Volume 44, Issue 12, 2012

Op-eds

China’s Waste Import Ban: A Wake-up Call, But for Who? China US Focus, 2018-6-22

The Increasing Visibility of Inequality in Urban China, China US Focus, 2018-1-18