I am grateful to receive the Liu Graduate Research Fellowship from the Center for Chinese Studies. Thanks to the funding support, I was able to conduct a trip to Hong Kong in summer 2023 following up with my previous fieldwork trip in 2022. During the trip, I was able to catch up with some of my collaborators, collect additional data, and validate some information for my dissertation project studying active transportation planning in Hong Kong.
The fellowship also made it possible for me to attend several academic events and conferences in China, sharing the research findings with scholars with common interests. In the previous year, I mentored two undergraduate student research assistants to help me collect social media data from Facebook and Twitter on civic urbanism from the lens of public space placemaking. I am continuing working on this project by collecting more data, which is supplemented by qualitative data collected from interviews. I am using the mixed methods approach to compare Hong Kong with the Bay Area case, so that to understand context-specific active transportation policy and sustainable transportation policy transfer in different built environment, and socio-economic contexts.
In the following year, I plan to continue working on my dissertation project, understanding the nuances of sustainable transportation policy, pedestrian behaviors and the built environment across cultures and states. Again, I greatly appreciate the generous support from the Center for Chinese Study, which made my dissertation research possible.
-Meiqing Li
Department of City and Regional Planning
CCS 2023 Liu Graduate Research Fellowships in Chinese Studies