Guibo Sun

Dr Guibo Sun is a Lecturer in Urban Planning at the University of Manchester. He is an urban studies and planning researcher. His research interests in large-scale infrastructure lie at the interfaces of urban planning, land policy, transportation, urban design, and public health. Through leading research and practice projects, he has also developed expertise in international planning systems (e.g., Hong Kong, China, Vietnam, Malaysia, Thailand, Pakistan, Ethiopia). He was an Assistant Professor at The University of Hong Kong before he joined Manchester.

His research won several prestigious awards, including the RTPI Early Career Academic Award (Winner) in 2019, the RTPI Commendation Awards for Research Excellence in 2019 and 2021; and Finalist (2023); the US Lincoln Institute International Fellowship in 2023, and the HKU Research Output Prize in 2021. He published articles in highly reputable journals, including Urban Studies, Landscape and Urban Planning, Transportation Research Part A, Health & Place, Environment and Planning B, and Town Planning Review. He also published two policy reports. His research was funded by national and international competitive research grants and industry funds.

My research focuses on understanding infrastructure provision and assessing its impact. The social, economic and health impacts of large-scale infrastructure interventions, such as new metro, urban renewal, large-block gated communities, and global street experiments, are profound. I specialise in using natural experiments to infer the causality of such impacts. I am also interested in the institution and governance of the infrastructure provisions, using experimental economics approaches to formulate the decision-making processes in local governments.

My teaching philosophy focuses on challenging students to develop new thought patterns, perspectives, knowledge, competencies, and skills when analyzing urban problems through embedding spatial and critical thinking in the problem formulation and solution. I have taught courses for undergraduate and postgraduate students. I received HKU Faculty Teaching Award 2022. The Panel was impressed with my “dedication to teaching, and innovative pedagogical approaches to enduring excellence to enhance student learning experiences and learning outcomes”.

Knowledge exchange and societal responsibility are embedded in my research. I constructed the three-dimensional pedestrian network in Hong Kong to support planning research and practice in high-density cities. As the first such database in the world, it shows how the high-density development model in Asian cities would urge scholars and practitioners to rethink urban design. The data were transferred to the Lands Department of Hong Kong and became open access in 2020 through the government portal, supporting public sectors, industries and research communities. I finished a professional body-funded research project for Hong Kong surveyors on planning and development in Thailand, Vietnam, and Malaysia. I served on the Hong Kong Government’s Buildings Department technical committee for six years, revising the Design Manual for the city (2017-2023), to make the high-density city accessible for the visually impaired, wheelchair users, and older people. 

I am an associate editor of the Journal of Transport & Health (Elsevier) and a board member of the World Society for Transport and Land Use Research (WSTLUR). I served on the technical committee to revise the Design Manual for the city of Hong Kong.

PhD, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2014

MSc, Liaoning Technical University, 2010

I have supervised three PhD students through to successful completion. I would be happy to hear from potential PhD students with interests in the following areas and topics:

• Transport and healthy ageing
• Institution and governance of urban infrastructure
• Urbanisation of Southeast Asian countries
• Land policy in China
• Natural experiments and experimental economics approaches 

I was the founding director of the Urban Analytics and Interventions Research Lab when I was an assistant professor at the University of Hong Kong. The lab was later transformed into the Urban Infrastructure Transition Lab (uLab-Infrastructure, https://www.uitlab.org/), a platform with researchers based in the UK, Hong Kong and China focusing on infrastructure research and practices.