IACP 3rd Annual Conference in Nanjing

Following the first and the second annual IACP conference on China’s Urban Development and Planning (2007 and 2008), the third annual conference was held on June 21-23 in Nanjing, China’s capital city during six dynasties. This conference was financially supported by Nanjing University and the USA Department of Housing and Urban Development. Faculty and students in the City and Regional Planning Department in Nanjing University showed great hospitality. Their diligent work made the conference a great success.

The conference theme was “Adapting Chinese Planning to Global Challenges and Opportunities”. Sessions were organized around topics such as urban and regional economic development, ecological planning, planning for resilient cities, sustainable urban transportation and planning support systems. Despite the inconvenience caused by the swine flu, conference had participants from the USA, Canada, Australia, Hong Kong and Mainland China. There were 68 conference presentations, including two key-note speeches by IACP members (Richard LeGates and Tingwei Zhang; Zhongren Peng).

Nanjing University has generously supported conference participation of IACP members. Among the 26 IACP participants, 18 received funding from Nanjing University through the early agreement with IACP. The funding covers domestic travel and conference attendance cost. Eight of the 18 are graduate students in USA universities. In addition, ten IACP members who paid the membership fee before January 1st 2009 were qualified to receive additional $400 each to defray their international trip cost. IACP board members, however, did not receive the $400 subsidy because they all traveled to the conference using other funding sources.  

In the closing ceremony, Professor Qing SHEN (IACP chairman) and Professor Jiangang XU (Chairman of the Department of Urban and Regional Planning at Nanjing University) jointly announced the winners of the IACP Excellent Student Paper Award. Two students shared this honor. They are Lu XU from Nanjing University (first author of the article Extending point-based space syntax: An exploratory research on space partition parameters and their geographic influences) and Wenjia ZHANG from Peking University (first author of the article What affects the home-work decision in Chinese two-earner households? A discrete-continuous choice modeling analysis). Each winner received an award certificate plus a check of US$300 from IACP.