This brief article summarizes my positive impression of the Chinese scholars over the last fourteen years in the Special Program for Urban and Regional Studies(SPURS) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Camb...This brief article summarizes my positive impression of the Chinese scholars over the last fourteen years in the Special Program for Urban and Regional Studies(SPURS) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts. In particular, I highlight the fellows' intellectual humility and passion for continuous learning from others. The fellows are, however, very comprehensive in the way they analyze all aspects of design problems and quite bold in their design imagination, compared to United States' graduate students who are more cautious to propose any radical change in urban form. Surprisingly, the Chinese fellows rarely address social equity issues in project design and do not usually worry about project implementation challenges, perhaps because they assume that such issues are to be addressed by policy makers at higher levels. In contrast, the U.S. students frequently raise issues of social equity but are hesitant to propose radical changes because of limited power of public planning institutions in the United States. Such contrasts in design thinking is ideal for comparative and critical analysis which has enriched the SPURS program.展开更多
文摘This brief article summarizes my positive impression of the Chinese scholars over the last fourteen years in the Special Program for Urban and Regional Studies(SPURS) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts. In particular, I highlight the fellows' intellectual humility and passion for continuous learning from others. The fellows are, however, very comprehensive in the way they analyze all aspects of design problems and quite bold in their design imagination, compared to United States' graduate students who are more cautious to propose any radical change in urban form. Surprisingly, the Chinese fellows rarely address social equity issues in project design and do not usually worry about project implementation challenges, perhaps because they assume that such issues are to be addressed by policy makers at higher levels. In contrast, the U.S. students frequently raise issues of social equity but are hesitant to propose radical changes because of limited power of public planning institutions in the United States. Such contrasts in design thinking is ideal for comparative and critical analysis which has enriched the SPURS program.
