I-Chun Catherine Chang

I-Chun Catherine Chang is an urban and economic geographer. She has been a member of the Macalester Geography Department since 2015. Catherine received her B.A. in Geography from National Kaohsiung Normal University, M.Sc. in Geography from National Taiwan University (both in Taiwan), and Ph.D. in Geography, Environment and Society from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. Her research interests include global urbanism, urban sustainability, policy mobilities and East Asia. Catherine’s scholarship focuses on the political economy of eco-city initiatives. Her research draws on qualitative methods to contextualize how these initiatives manifest on the ground, and trace how the complex connectivities of these initiatives shape the global circulation of sustainable planning knowledge and practices. In articles related to or extending from her dissertation, Catherine used two newly built Chinese eco-cities as case studies to examine their spatio-temporal variegations and the trans-local policy mobilities in relation to Shanghai, Tianjin, London and Singapore. Building on this line of work, Catherine’s new research projects will investigate the financing and financialization of sustainable urbanism production, the inequality implications of Asian green urban projects, and the role of transnational sustainable urban planners in policy exchanges.

Courses

• GEOG 115: Thinking Geographically: The Fundamentals of Human Geography
• GEOG 203: Introduction to Urban Ecology
• GEOG 261: Geography of World Urbanization
• GEOG 244: Geography of Asia
• GEOG 320: Asian Cities
• GEOG 472: Global Urbanism

Links for Geography course syllabi can be found on our Course Syllabi page.