About

The Beijing City Lab (BCL) is a research community, dedicated to (but not limited to) studying China’s capital Beijing. The Lab focuses on employing interdisciplinary methods to quantify urban dynamics, generating new insights for urban planning and governance, and ultimately producing the science of cities required for sustainable urban development. The lab's current mix of planners, architects, geographers, economists, and policy analysts lends unique research strength.

The BCL is proud of becoming China's first open urban research network, and contributing to the global intellectual commons. The BCL produces and disseminates knowledge of Beijing in a number of ways:

1. The BCL serves as a networking platform for its research fellows and junior/student members.

1. Urban researchers are invited to use the working paper series to disseminate their findings about Beijing.
2. The BCL's data release provides open research data about Beijing to the wider scientific community.

BCL email: BeijingCityLab(at)gmail(dot)com

Email list of BCL: BCL(at)FreeLists(dot)org (to join, click here http://www.freelists.org/list/bcl)

BCL Sina Weibo: https://weibo.com/u/3922732288?tabtype=feed

Note that BCL is not affiliated to any research institutes. 

In October 2013, Dr. Ying Long and his collaborators together advocated and established Beijing City Lab (BCL, www.beijingcitylab.com) - an academic network dedicated to quantitative urban studies and focuses on employing interdisciplinary methods to quantify urban dynamics, generating new insights for urban planning and governance, and ultimately producing the science of cities required for sustainable urban development. With his effort and the core team members under his leadership, BCL has been enjoying a sustained growth, receiving widespread attention locally and globally and gradually becoming a portal and a platform for academics all over the world to understand Chinese urban studies. Hundreds of scholars and students are asking for becoming a member of BCL now. On the BCL platform, the data shared by BCL provide the basis of amazing academic research on the one hand. The working papers of BCLers represent the latest progress of Chinese quantitative urban studies on the other hand, thereby securing the leadership of BCL in relevant fields. Moreover, BCL puts forward the unofficial ranking of Chinese cities on its “Ranking” channel regarding various aspects of cities expecting attention from decision makers and the public.

The research theme of Beijing City Lab take the quality of living environment in “New Urbanization Planning of China” as the core with sincere hopes to fully monitor, measure and diagnose the quality of living environment in a rapidly urbanizing period of China and provide reference for national decision making. As mentioned previously, besides the study about China’s potential population exposure to PM2.5 at the township scale and evaluation of public transportation coverage level, BCL is doing research like identifying functional urban area of all Chinese cities at the prefecture level or above and evaluating the quality of life at the township level.

Beijing City Lab devotes itself to disseminate the development of quantitative urban studies all over the world. Besides publishing the papers and data of Chinese scholars on international platform, BCL also keeps an eye on international comments about Chinese quantitative urban studies. For instance, Dr. Ying Long interviewed Prof. Michael Batty from Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis of University College London on behalf of BCL, and finished a paper about retrospect and prospect of urban models. In 2014, BCL interviewed Prof. Peter Hall from Bartlett School of Planning of UCL, who proposed his opinion on Chinese’s new urbanization planning.