This project examines the patterns, causes, and impacts of urban land conversion in two rapidly developing countries: China and Vietnam. The primary research objective of the project is to carry out a long-term spatial analysis of the historical spatial and temporal patterns of urban land-use change, and the individual and interacting demographic, economic, political, and institutional factors that contribute to these changes. The project will seek to understand urban land-use change as an outcome of the dynamic interaction among multi-level governments, population, domestic and international investors, local enterprises, multi-national corporations, community organizations, and individual households.

The educational objective of the project is to create and implement a new cross-campus GIS course, to initiate an outreach program to a local minority school through summer research opportunities, and to develop a teaching module on urbanization in Asia that can be used in conjunction with a documentary film that has already been developed by Seto. These objectives are to be accomplished through an annual cycle of integrated research and educational activities carried out in collaboration with established international researchers, Eastside College Preparatory School in East Palo Alto, and undergraduate and graduate students at Stanford. The central questions of the project will be examined using remotely sensed data, demographic-economic data from national compendium, and in-depth field interviews.

The overarching objective of this research is to advance theoretical understanding of how human activity transforms Earth's surface to urban uses through testing hypotheses at specific and across scales. Recent reforms in China and Vietnam make them particularly opportune areas to investigate these questions, and multiple study sites in both countries will be used as observational laboratories to meet this objective. This research will contribute to the theorization of coupled human-environment interactions and processes using lessons learned from place-based studies at multiple scales. It will advance urban and human geography, Earth system science and human dimensions of global change by improving the understanding of urbanization dynamics in a global environmental change perspective.