Chris Webster
Biographic Data
| ID | 3720187 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Chris Webster |
| GIVEN NAMES | Chris |
| FAMILY NAME | Webster |
| SIGNATURE | WEBSTER C |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Hong Kong |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-2171-7495 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 95 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 808 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 95 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1951 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 15 |
Using Social Network Analysis to Study Hate Speech in English Football During the White Lives Matter Banner Controversy
In June 2020, a group of football supporters from Burnley FC arranged for a ‘White Lives Matter’ banner to be flown over Manchester City’s Etihad Stadium in protest against the English Premier League’s (EPL) decision to support the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. Utilizing a mixed-methods social network analysis (SNA) approach, we identified opinion leaders on X (formerly Twitter) to assess their influence in shaping the discussions and narrat…
Measuring lockdown travel rebound
While localized lockdowns emerged as pivotal Non-pharmaceutical Interventions (NPIs) during the mid-to-late phases of the COVID-19 pandemic, the precise impacts on residential mobility remain understudied, including pre-and post-lockdown travel comparisons, ‘bounce-back’, and long and short-term adjustments. Policymakers were particularly concerned about unanticipated viral transmission from undiagnosed asymptomatic carriers. This study investiga…
Socioeconomic status and suicidal behaviour in the UK Biobank
Socioeconomic status (SES) is a risk factor of suicidal behaviour. Little is however known if such association varies across strata of loneliness, social isolation, and area-level deprivation. We examined the association between SES and suicidal behaviour, and its modification by loneliness, social isolation and neighbourhood deprivation. We used a large prospective cohort from the UK Biobank comprising participants aged 38-73 years and followed-…
The value-capture paradox of metro accessibility and gated communities in China
This paper highlights a critical challenge in China: although metro projects are justified by their potential to improve accessibility—a core public good—these benefits are often captured by private developers through the construction of gated communities around metro stations. We argue that local government’s reliance on land finance to cover the high costs of the infrastructure has distorted planning priorities, relegating the creation of perme…
Scaling of urban environmental performance in Chinese cities
Modeling how green performance attributes scale over cities of different size reveals how an urban system performs environmentally as a whole, establishes population-adjusted limits for expected urban management targets, identifies cities doing better or worse than expected for their size, and is a starting point for systematically explaining such variation from the mean. This seems a useful contribution to devising strategies for sustainable urb…
Spatio‐temporal impact of land use changes on nitrogen emissions in the Guangdong–Hong Kong–Macao Greater Bay Area
Land use changes, especially urban land expansion, exert a profound effect on nitrogen (N) cycles in the interconnected human–natural systems, altering the distribution and intensity of N emissions resulting from anthropogenic activities. However, few studies have revealed the dynamic response of N emissions to diverse land use changes at the regional scale. This study developed a holistic spatial urban metabolism framework that combines land‐use…
Bid-Rent Logic and City Structure in the Online Shopping Era
As IT advances transform shopping and commuting habits city structure is likely to change. We examine the reorganization of urban spatial structures in a future city dominated by online shopping, super-speed metros, and remote work. Using a modified Alonso model and spatial equilibrium analysis, we explore how reduced shopping time, lower delivery costs, and logistics centres relocating to inner cities reshape urban form. Employing bid-rent logic…
Difficulties for Theorisation Within Planning Research and Practice – An Exploration of Key Dimensions of Planning Theories
The contribution by Benjamin Davy, Agnes Förster and Edward Shepherd sheds light on normative conflicts and the foundations of spatial planning in theories and practice. Here, the challenge of theorising lies in moving beyond individual moral-ethical positions. Instead of just referring to one set of individual planning ethics, the authors engage to reflect fundamentally on how planners can make clashing normative values visible and negotiable. T…
Global Street Experiment
Street experiment is a tactical urbanism practice that involves implementing temporary changes in street use through regulatory or physical interventions, aimed at people-centric street transition. During the Covid-19 pandemic, cities worldwide implemented street experiments to accommodate the need for socially-distanced physical and commercial activities. However, we know little about the locations and urban environments of these pandemic-induce…
Coupling planning models with models of spontaneous order
When the E&P stable was organised, 'B' took design and planning research with a computational emphasis.The underlying research motivations included designers looking for more science, engineers looking for social science, and social scientists enjoying the mixed company afforded by the quantitative social science revolution.In this heterogeneous field there was little anchoring orthodoxy in terms of philosophy of science, and the journey that fol…
Racial disparities in environmental exposures and Sars-CoV-2 infection rates
Generating sparse origin–destination flows on shared mobility networks using probabilistic graph neural networks
Surfacic networks
Surfacic networks are structures built upon a 2D manifold. Many systems, including transportation networks and various urban networks, fall into this category. The fluctuations of node elevations imply significant deviations from typical plane networks and require specific tools to understand their impact. Here, we present such tools, including lazy paths that minimize elevation differences, graph arduousness which measures the tiring nature of s…
Wildfire risk for global wildland–urban interface areas
Sites of intensity
This paper contributes to highlight new insights on the social and political dimensions of emotions experienced within leisure through a specific focus on the everyday lives of people seeking asylum in the UK. In doing so, we draw on and expand inter-disciplinary perspectives that have underlined how the affective intensities and (in)capacities of bodies, and the conditions through which these emerge in everyday lives, are central in the workings…
New metro and housing price and rent premiums
Causal evidence of housing premiums of new metro lines is indispensable for financing and governing infrastructure investments. Previous studies have investigated the housing effects of urban rail transit with varying methods, while causality remains unsettled. This study used a natural experiment to estimate the causal effects of the new metro interventions on housing premiums in Shenzhen, China. We used metro planning knowledge, reasoning on pu…
Moderation effect of visible urban greenery on the association between neighbourhood deprivation and subjective well-being
Natural experiments in healthy cities research
Healthy cities researchers often ask questions about cause and effect: the causes are built environment interventions via urban planning and design practices, such as park renovation, a new bus line or a housing redevelopment programme; effects are individual and public health outcomes. The growing interest in natural experiments for causal inference in healthy cities research comes mainly from the public health fields. Planning and design knowle…
Re-examining Jane Jacobs’ doctrine using new urban data in Hong Kong
Jane Jacobs (1961) theorized that four urban form conditions, namely, mixed use, short block, aged buildings and density, are indispensable for the ‘exuberant diversity’ and conducive to, or perhaps even determinant of, the success of a city district. Jacobs’ theory has been used widely as a reference point in case study research and policy and design prescriptions. We found five studies that attempted to test it more formally, using various perf…
Associations of Urban Built Environment with Cardiovascular Risks and Mortality
Developer obligations and negotiation-based benefit distribution in urban redevelopment
The distribution of potential benefits between local governments and developers in urban redevelopment shows a global popularity of negotiating developer obligations for more value capture in exchange for the adjustments to land-use regulations. Existing literature has focused on the institutional factors at national or city level that determine the effectiveness of developer obligations for public value capturing, neglecting the potential gains …
Contrasting inequality in human exposure to greenspace between cities of Global North and Global South
The United Nations specified the need for “providing universal access to greenspace for urban residents” in the 11th Sustainable Development Goal. Yet, how far we are from this goal remains unclear. Here, we develop a methodology incorporating fine-resolution population and greenspace mappings and use the results for 2020 to elucidate global differences in human exposure to greenspace. We identify a contrasting difference of greenspace exposure b…
Green spaces, especially nearby forest, may reduce the Sars-CoV-2 infection rate
Divergent distributions of physicians and healthcare beds in China
Investigating pedestrian-level greenery in urban forms in a high-density city for urban planning
Urban villages under China's rapid urbanization
Informality and the Development and Demolition of Urban Villages in the Chinese Peri-urban Area
The fate of Chinese urban villages ( chengzhongcun) has recently attracted both research and policy attention. Two important unaddressed questions are: what are the sources of informality in otherwise orderly Chinese cities; and, will village redevelopment policy eliminate informality in the Chinese city? Reflecting on the long-established study of informal settlements and recent research on informality, it is argued that the informality in China…
Property Rights Redistribution, Entitlement Failure and the Impoverishment of Landless Farmers in China
Within the process of urban expansion through land requisition in China, farmers' de facto rights to collective land, including farmland and housing plots ( zhaijidi), are forcibly acquired by the state and thereafter redistributed to private developers, to facilitate urban-based economic growth. Deprived of a secure livelihood, some landless farmers become trapped in poverty. Others find that the property rights restructuring in urbanised villag…
Social Groups and Housing Differentiation in China's Urban Villages
Possessing different land rights and distinct landscapes, and separated from the rest of the city by invisible institutional boundaries, China's urban villages are unusual enclaves for landless farmers, rural migrants and other urban hukou (citizenship rights) holders in a period of rapid urbanization. Although urban villages are well known for their disorder and unruliness, they provide temporary livelihood for indigenous villagers and inexpensi…
Land Dispossession and Enrichment in China’s Suburban Villages
This paper takes a fresh look at the land dispossession that is central to Chinese urbanisation. It documents in detail the property rights changes that occur when village land is taken by a municipal government and analyses the value of those rights by looking at compensation accounts for a case study village in the city of Xiamen in Fujian Province. The purpose of the paper is to show the complexity of the property rights dynamics during land e…
Enclosure of the urban commons
Property rights with price tags? Pricing uncertainties in the production, transaction and consumption of China’s small property right housing
Informality, property rights, and poverty in China’s “favelas”
In this study of households living in informal settlements in three principal Chinese cities, we analyze the associations between informality, property rights, and poverty. We propose that informality can be understood in terms of property rights (presence/absence, strength, completeness, and ambiguity). Drawing on the property rights (entitlements) theories of Sen, de Soto, Ostrom, Alchian, and Coase, we refine a list of property rights effects …
Gated Communities
This article examines the notion of gated communities and, more generally, privately governed urban neighbourhoods. We do this by reviewing the idea that they are an innovative built-environment genre that has spread globally from a diverse set of roots and influences. These include the mass growth of private urban government in the USA over the past 30 years; rising income inequalities and fear in big cities; the French condominium law of 1804; …
Public Choice, Pigouvian and Coasian Planning Theory
With urban planning policy in transition in many parts of the world, the need to understand the theoretical bases for planning and to ground discussion about policy innovations on theory is as important as ever. This essay reviews the relevance of three economic paradigms to the theory of development control. It is written as a technical review with the purpose of explaining, contrasting and contextualising the contributions of these paradigms. M…
Gates or No Gates? A Cross-European Enquiry into the Driving Forces behind Gated Communities
Cséfalvay Z. and Webster C. Gates or no gates? A cross-European enquiry into the driving forces behind gated communities, Regional Studies. This paper addresses one of the biggest gaps in research on gated communities: why is the phenomenon so strong in some countries, but absent in others? After reviewing the mainstream explanations, it outlines an alternative thesis based on theories of public choice and fiscal federalism. To test the relevance…
Estimating the mediating effect of privately-supplied green space on the relationship between urban public green space and property value
Homeowners Associations, Collective Action and the Costs of Private Governance
This paper examines collective action problems in privately managed neighbourhoods and considers government and market reponses to these. Taiwan's experience of Home Owners Associations (HOAs) is used to show that entrepreneurs have a strong incentive to deliver private governance capacity and are apparently more effective in doing so than either government (by coercion) or residents (by voluntary association). However, government needs to reduce…
Unravelling residential satisfaction and relocation intention in three urban neighborhood types in Guangzhou, China
Co-evolution of gated communities and local public goods
Gated communities are often seen as steps towards the privatization of the public realm. This is too simple a characterization, however: privately and publicly governed infrastructure and services exist and adapt symbiotically. There is little empirical research focusing on the co-evolution of private and public neighbourhoods. In this paper we focus on a specific question that has not yet been answered: does the spatial pattern of privately supp…
Path Dependency and the Neighbourhood Effect
In this paper we examine poverty concentration in Chinese impoverished neighbourhoods and estimate the effects of household characteristics and neighbourhood types on social deprivation. We find that unemployed households in old neighbourhoods are among the most deprived. The Chinese case suggests that urban poverty is concentrated by particular social groups living in specific neighbourhoods. We find a small but not insignificant neighbourhood e…
Built environment configuration and change in body mass index
Poverty Concentration and Determinants in China's Urban Low-income Neighbourhoods and Social Groups
Based on a large-scale household survey conducted in 2007, this article reports on poverty concentration and determinants in China's low-income neighbourhoods and social groups. Three types of neighbourhood are recognized: dilapidated inner-city neighbourhoods, declining workers' villages and urban villages. Respondents are grouped into four categories: working, laid-off/unemployed and retired urban residents, together with rural migrants. We fir…
Poverty incidence and concentration in different social groups in urban China, a case study of Nanjing
The nature of cities and the Covid-19 pandemic
Ungating the city
China is seeking to prohibit the construction of any new gated communities and to gradually open existing schemes after three decades of growth of large-block gated estates. In this article, we use permeability analysis to explore the ‘what if?’ question posed by the policy: what if gated communities became permeable? We ask the question in respect of non-motorised access. We use two permeability metrics, closeness and betweenness, as outcome mea…
Identifying house price effects of changes in urban street configuration
We explore the proposition that the fast continuous changes in urban street network associated with urban growth and the attendant changes in accessibility are partial determinants of micro-level house price movement. To test this hypothesis we examine the dynamic relationship between urban configuration and house price in the short-run from 2005 to 2010, taking the case of the city of Nanjing, China. A spatial-network analysis method is employed…
Street network accessibility-based methodology for appraisal of land use master plans
Institutional innovations in land development and planning in the 20th and 21st centuries
Coase, Spatial Pricing and Self -organising Cities
Modern computational techniques offer new horizons for urban economics in the form of agent-based simulation frameworks. This paper reports on a cellular automata (CA) simulation in which urban land transforms on the basis of locally optimal bargaining between developers and local communities (local governments). Because CA is an explicitly spatial modelling methodology, the space-time-specific paths to global equilibrium can be observed. Because…
The Physical and Regional Geography of the U.S.S.R
Information Technology in Geography and Planning
Part I - Geographic Data: Theory and Hardware 1. Information and Systems Concepts 2. The Hardware Environment Part II - Geographic Data: Acquisition and Organization 3. Data Capture 1 - Generation 4. Data Capture 2 - Retrieval 5. Structures for Geographical Data Part III - Geographic Data: Manipulation 6. Fundamental Graphical Procedures 7. Cartographic Methods 1 - Vector Techniques 8. Cartographic Methods 2 - Raster Techniques Part IV - Geograph…
Child-Care Services and the Urban Labour Market. Part 1
In this two-part paper we examine some of the market characteristics of urban child-care services. Part 1 is concerned with theory. In it we review the contemporary child-care and preschool education service issue; consider questions of market efficiency and equity, and formulate these in a general equilibrium model which generates testable household labour-supply and service-supply functions. In part 2 we report on an empirical study in which ag…
Child-Care Services and the Urban Labour Market. Part 2
In part 1 of this appear we reviewed the principal features and failures of the market for child-care services in cities. A theoretical framework was developed which generated testable labour-supply and service-supply functions. In part 2, an empirical study is reported in which aggregate versions of those functions are calibrated for the supply of labour from mothers with young children and for the supply of childminding services. Special attent…
The use of geographical information systems in assessing spatial and socio‐economic impacts of parental choice
Previous studies in parental choice have examined the nature of so‐called pull and push factors and the nature of the decision‐making process facing parents when deciding upon a secondary school for their children. A review of the literature has revealed that there are spatial aspects of parental choice which have largely been neglected by educational researchers. This paper highlights a number of education‐based studies which have utilized spati…
Public Choice, Pigouvian and Coasian Planning Theory
With urban planning policy in transition in many parts of the world, the need to understand the theoretical bases for planning and to ground discussion about policy innovations on theory is as important as ever. This essay reviews the relevance of three economic paradigms to the theory of development control. It is written as a technical review with the purpose of explaining, contrasting and contextualising the contributions of these paradigms. M…
Regulation, Land-Use Mix, and Urban Performance. Part 2
Part 1 of this two-part paper presented a spatial economic model of the urban development process which captures developers' profit-seeking behaviour, communities' welfare-seeking behaviour, and the mediating effects of alternative systems of land-use rights. Different systems of rights were shown to result in different land-use and density outcomes. In part 2 we describe the simulation model used to implement the theoretical model. The emphasis …
Regulation, Land-Use Mix, and Urban Performance. Part 1
In this paper we present the theoretical model underlying a series of experiments that use cellular automata (CA) simulations to explore the impact of alternative systems of pollution property rights on urban morphology and performance. It is a partial equilibrium model of developer and community behaviour which allows a formal expression of the urban development processes under alternative regulative regimes. These include pure markets; impure m…
Seeing the odalisque
(1999). Seeing the odalisque: aspects of the colonial gaze in South Africa 1845–1975. de arte: Vol. 34, No. 60, pp. 20-28
The portrait cabinet of Dr Bleek
AS A FORM of representation of external reality the photograph in its colonial context played a powerful role in helping to establish concepts of order and interpretations of an alien environment. Importantly, as well as measuring potential resources (topographical, geological and human), it could provide the means to place an alien world in a comprehensible European context. As images were constructed subjectively they were (often it seems unwit…
Gated cities of tomorrow
This paper is about the re-engineering of the public realm. Its purpose is to encourage balanced debate about the rising numbers of residential schemes in British and other European cities that supply collectively consumed neighbourhood goods and services exclusively to households within the 'gates'. It reviews the wider global trend towards gated developments and comments on the academic debates arising. It sets out reasons--offered as testable …
Coase, Spatial Pricing and Self -organising Cities
Modern computational techniques offer new horizons for urban economics in the form of agent-based simulation frameworks. This paper reports on a cellular automata (CA) simulation in which urban land transforms on the basis of locally optimal bargaining between developers and local communities (local governments). Because CA is an explicitly spatial modelling methodology, the space-time-specific paths to global equilibrium can be observed. Because…
The Global Spread of Gated Communities
Property Rights and the Public Realm
Discussions about gated communities, shopping malls, and industrial parks—proprietary developments produced by entrepreneurs—frequently espouse overly simplistic notions of private and public realms, viewing the encroachment of the latter by the former as a threat. In this essay I develop the thesis that, in reality, cities naturally fragment into many small publics, each of which may be thought of as a collective consumption club. The club realm…
The Donald Robertson memorial prizewinner 2003 The nature of the neighbourhood
This paper considers the order that emerges in cities as individuals exchange and pool rights over resources in pursuit of individual and mutual gain. In his 1937 article The nature of the firm, Ronald Coase explained the existence and size of firms in terms of transaction costs. Neighbourhoods are important units of consumption and production and can, like firms, be explained by transaction costs. A theory of the neighbourhood is developed based…
Homeowners Associations, Collective Action and the Costs of Private Governance
This paper examines collective action problems in privately managed neighbourhoods and considers government and market reponses to these. Taiwan's experience of Home Owners Associations (HOAs) is used to show that entrepreneurs have a strong incentive to deliver private governance capacity and are apparently more effective in doing so than either government (by coercion) or residents (by voluntary association). However, government needs to reduce…
Enclosure of the urban commons
The Decentralising Metropolis
This paper investigates historical changes in economic structure and the spatial distribution of jobs and commuting patterns during a period of consolidating suburban decentralisation in US cities. The analysis of selected US metropolitan areas is based on data drawn from the 1980 and 1990 PUMS (public use microdata samples). First, the paper compares changes in employment composition between regions and between two geographical subdivisions in e…
John Pell (1611-1685) and his Correspondence with Sir Charles Cavendish
This impressive and substantial volume rescues John Pell from obscurity and makes him into one of best-investigated members of the English scientific movement of the seventeenth century. The basic sources for the study are the fifty volumes of Pell manuscripts located in the British Library. The persistent neglect of this material has impaired our understanding of the famous English scientific movement of the mid-seventeenth century. The successf…
Poverty incidence and concentration in different social groups in urban China, a case study of Nanjing
Gated Communities
This article examines the notion of gated communities and, more generally, privately governed urban neighbourhoods. We do this by reviewing the idea that they are an innovative built-environment genre that has spread globally from a diverse set of roots and influences. These include the mass growth of private urban government in the USA over the past 30 years; rising income inequalities and fear in big cities; the French condominium law of 1804; …
Are Some Planning Transactions Intrinsically Sovereign
The laws, policies, customary practices and other institutions that govern a country's land development and the pattern of its spatial economy are constantly evolving. They change at the margin and by catastrophe; involving major land reform, minor statutes, economic crises, and gradual shifts in the way things are done. This article analyses the institutions of planning using qualitative models of incomplete contracting. It portrays them as flui…
Property Rights Redistribution, Entitlement Failure and the Impoverishment of Landless Farmers in China
Within the process of urban expansion through land requisition in China, farmers' de facto rights to collective land, including farmland and housing plots ( zhaijidi), are forcibly acquired by the state and thereafter redistributed to private developers, to facilitate urban-based economic growth. Deprived of a secure livelihood, some landless farmers become trapped in poverty. Others find that the property rights restructuring in urbanised villag…
Social Groups and Housing Differentiation in China's Urban Villages
Possessing different land rights and distinct landscapes, and separated from the rest of the city by invisible institutional boundaries, China's urban villages are unusual enclaves for landless farmers, rural migrants and other urban hukou (citizenship rights) holders in a period of rapid urbanization. Although urban villages are well known for their disorder and unruliness, they provide temporary livelihood for indigenous villagers and inexpensi…
Urban villages under China's rapid urbanization
Geography (56 works) · Economics (39 works) · Computer Science (29 works) · Political science (28 works) · Business (27 works) · China (26 works) · Engineering (26 works) · Sociology (23 works) · Urban Transport and Accessibility (23 works) · Economic growth (19 works)