Dr. Xuefei Ren receives HARP grant to study urban redevelopment

February 13, 2020 - Karessa Weir

The proposal "Whose City? Urban Redevelopment in China, India, Brazil and the U.S." was selected for $25,000 in funding through the Humanities and Arts Research Program (HARP), announced Doug Gage, Assistant Vice President of the Office of Research and Innovation. 

The program provides funds to support faculty who are conducting important research leading to creative and performance projects or activities in the arts and humanities.

Dr. Ren will use HARP funding for data collection and fieldwork in Guangzhou, Mumbai, Rio de Janeiro, and Chicago in 2020-2022.

"Many cities around the world suffer from an enduring housing crisis and acute forms of housing inequality. In the global South, urban dwellers often find places to live only in informal settlements, with precarious tenure security and substandard infrastructure. In the global North, low-income families cluster in segregated and poorly managed public housing projects," Dr. Ren wrote.

"These areas of concentrated poverty, whether in the form of informal settlements or public housing, have been targeted for intervention by policies of redevelopment. This project compares the strategies and outcomes of redevelopment targeting low-income neighborhoods in China, India, Brazil, and the United States. These four countries are selected as they represent a wide spectrum of approaches to redevelopment, as exemplified by removal in China, resettlement in India, upgrading in Brazil, and integration in the United States."