Xu Han

I studied design as an undergraduate in Harbin Institute of Technology and got my engineering degree. I graduated from Harbin Institute of Technology (Shenzhen) as a master in design and received a degree in art. The title of my master thesis is the Facade design of community shops based on SD model of Kansei Engineering, from which my design research object starts to focus on some urban spaces. I am now pursuing my PhD at the University of Erfurt and start to deeply investigate the property of urban space.

My research analyzes the supply and demand of urban design from the perspective of property theory and institutional economics, which targets the urban village in Shenzhen, China. In the process of China's reform and opening up, due to the unique land system and the absence of urban planning laws and other factors, a large number of visually formal and informal spaces have been formed in urban villages. Different stakeholders including government, developers, indigenous people, designers and migrant workers, conflict or cooperate with each other based on property and shape the final landscape of these spaces. By summarizing these laws of landscape generation and evolution, I hope to break the perspective of the traditional global north and add new theoretical contributions to urban design research.

A picture of Xu Han.

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