Research Profile
Prof Chris Webster
Telephone:+44 (0)29 208 76084
Fax:+44 (0)29 208 74845
Address:Room 2.60, Glamorgan Building
Qualifications
BSc (Wales) MSc (Wales) DipTP (Wales) PhD (Hull) DSc(Econ) Cardiff. Chris Webster is an urban planner by initial training. His PhD in economic geography involved developing mathematical programming models of the small farm economic sector in Thailand. His interest in spatial economic simulation led him to obtain a Masters degree in computing from the Department of Computing Mathematics, University of Wales Cardiff. Over the years he has increasingly worked within the scholastic discipline of heterodox economics and he was recently awarded a higher doctorate for his published work on spontaneous urban order.
Recent honours and prizes include an invitation to deliver the 2007 distinguished visiting lecturer talk at University of Southern California School of Policy and Planning (March 2007); appointment as Honorary Professor of Urban Planning, Department of Real Estate and Construction, University of Hong Kong 2006-2009 (second term); appointment as Visiting Fellow, Department of Real Estate and Construction, University of Hong Kong (2000); appointment as Visiting Fellow, Centre for Environmental Studies and Urban Planning University of Hong Kong (1996); award of the 2003 prize for the best paper published in Urban Studies that year (Donald Roberston Memorial Prize for outstanding contribution to urban theory) - Webster CJ (2003) The nature of the neighbourhood. Urban Studies, 40(13) 2591-2612; shortlisting for the AESOP Prize papers in planning (European planning paper of the year) - Webster CJ (2001) Gated Cities of Tomorrow, Town Planning Review, 2001, Vol. 72(2), pp. 149 -170.
Research Interests
The economic theory of cities and urban planning; urban simulation; complex urban systems; spatial analysis; property rights; private urban governance and gated communities; Chinese urban development and planning; urban management capacity building in rapidly developing cities.
Selected Projects
- Urban Poverty and Property Rights Changes in China (with Professor Fulong Wu)
- The Challenge of Private Urban Governance and the Rise of Gated Communities in Europe
- Interactions Privé-Public dans la Production des espaces Périurbains
- Data mining and visualisation of large network spatial databases
- Higher Education Academy Subject Centre for the Built Environment
Selected Publications
- Gated Cities of Tomorrow
- Private cities: local and global perspectives
- Property rights, planning and markets: managing spontaneous cities
- The nature of the neighbourhood
- Property rights and the public realm: gates, green belts and gemeinschaft
- Simulation of land development through the integration of cellular automata and multi-criteria evaluation
Additional Information
Chris Webster is Professor of Urban Planning. and Head of the School of City and Regional Planning.
He has been teaching and researching in the School of since 1984. Before taking up a university post he worked as an urban planner in London and as an economic modeller in a development bank in Bangkok. He is often regarded as an economist because of his style of analysis, but most of his economics has, in fact, been learnt on the job. He is committed to interdisciplinary research, believing that triangulation across paradigms and methods leads to greater insight than is often found in mono-disciplinary scholarship. Since 1999 he has co-organised a multi-disciplinary network investigating the global spread of gated communities and private urban governance. Over the years he has also worked on a variety of training projects with UN agencies and has always maintained an Asian strand in his research portfolio. He first visited mainland China in 1983 and is currently running an ESRC/DFID project investigating the evolution of property rights and urban poverty in six Chinese cities. He is probably one of the only professors anywhere to be an editor of both a research journal (co-editor of Environment and Planning B) and a teaching journal (founding editor of CEBE Transactions). His commitment to excellence in teaching and to maintaining a healthy teaching-research-practice link within universities led him to set up the Centre for Education in the Built Environment, which he has directed from 2000 to 2012.