Transportation and Urban Planning

The Harvard-China Project has long worked on both: 1) air quality impacts of road and now air transport, led by scientists and engineers; and 2) urban planning to reduce transportation demand, led by urban planners in the Harvard Graduate School of Design. In recent years the Project has also developed engineering-based research capacities on transportation decarbonization, especially of light-duty road and air transport modes, as described under Energy Systems. 

A basis for many urban planning studies has been interdisciplinary household surveys in the city of Chengdu led by the Harvard-China Project and implemented by the Research Center for Contemporary China of Peking University, using RCCC's rigorous geospatial sampling methods to insure inclusion of non-registered migrants. The team completed the most recent interdisciplinary household survey in July 2016. The data were joined with an earlier dataset collected in a nearly identical Harvard-PKU survey in 2005, to cover changes in Chengdu's economy, urbanization, travel behavior, land use, air quality, and environmental health over 11 years. Both the 2005 and 2016 Chengdu surveys collected data for a wide range of research interests, including transportation planning, travel behavior, mobile-source emissions, outdoor and indoor air pollution exposures, health effects of air pollution, and perceptions and valuation of environmental health risk.  The team hopes to return to Chengdu for another household survey when the collaborative research environment allows it, to extend its analyses of changes in urban form, transport options, travel behavior, and popular perceptions over time.