Thursday, February 24, 2005
Karen Seto,
Center Fellow, Center for Environmental Science and Policy,
Stanford Institute for International Studies and Assistant Professor, Department of Geological and Environmental Sciences,
School of Earth Sciences, Stanford University,
"Urban Growth in China: Challenges and Prospects"
Abstract
China is undergoing an urban revolution. With 456 million urban residents in 2000 and UN estimates that this number will nearly double to 883 million by 2030, the Chinese urban landscape is likely to expand at a very rapid rate. Traditional agrarian communities and farmland are being metamorphosed by a changed economy and enveloped by extended urban regions. The kinds of urban regions that ultimately emerge in China will have considerable impacts on the country's continued economic development, social and political character, and environmental health and sustainability. Using time series satellite imagery over a thirty year period, this talk will describe the changing urban landscape in two regions—the Pearl River Delta, Guangdong Province and Greater Chengdu, Sichuan Province—in the context of policy reforms and socioeconomic drivers.
Karen Seto is a geographer with interdisciplinary training in political science, economics, and resource and environmental management. She teaches courses on remote sensing of land-use and land-cover change and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) in the Department of Geological and Environmental Sciences at Stanford University. Her research focuses on monitoring urban growth trajectories, understanding the causes of land-use change, and evaluating the social and ecological impacts of land-use dynamics. She is particularly interested in the spatio-temporal patterns and social interactions at the agriculture-urban land-use interface. Her primary geographic region of interest is Asia. She currently has projects in the Red River Delta in northern Vietnam and several regions in China. In these projects she integrates historical maps, high and moderate resolution satellite imagery, socioeconomic data, and biophysical information to evaluate the rates, trajectories, causes, and impacts of urban land-use change. Two important foci of the research are to quantify the loss of agricultural land, wetlands, and forest to urban growth and to assess the consequence of different urban configurations on landscape fragmentation. She is on a number of international scientific advisory boards including the International Human Dimensions Programme (IHDP) project on Urbanization and Global Environmental Change, and the World Conservation Union’s (IUCN) Commission on Ecosystem Management. She received her B.A. in Political Science from University of California, Santa Barbara; her M.A. in International Relations and Resource and Environmental Management from Boston University; and her Ph.D. in Geography from Boston University.
top
of page
408 North Indiana Avenue, Bloomington, IN 47408-3799
Phone: (812) 855-2230
TDD: (812) 855-7654
Fax: (812) 855-2634
Last Updated: January 13, 2005
Comments: cipec@indiana.edu
Copyright
2005, The Trustees of Indiana
University.
