About Colleen Chiu-Shee
About Colleen Chiu-Shee
Colleen Chiu-Shee is a scholar, practitioner, and educator in city design and development, a multidisciplinary field that connects planning with creative and humanist fields concerned with the built and natural environments. Her work advances planning’s futurist and imaginative dimensions by examining the bleeding edge of ideas, policies, and practices shaping green and just cities, and by grounding these visions in empirical research on how they travel globally and take root locally. Through this work, she seeks to revitalize planning’s seminal role in enabling value-aligned action and improving urban futures.
Her research emphasizes culturally comparative, relational, and transdisciplinary perspectives. It spans three overlapping areas:
- Future-city experiments: emerging forms of sustainable and equitable urbanism in China. This area examines innovative urban practices in China and places them in dialogue with related developments across the Global East, North, and South.
- Utopias in action: how visions of the future city shape urban practice. This line of inquiry explores how utopian thinking intersects with planning to generate spaces and moments of hope.
- From vision to system: smart technology as future-making infrastructure. This area examines the infrastructural role of digital technologies in shaping urban futures, supported in part by funding from the National Science Foundation.
As a teacher, Dr. Chiu-Shee draws on her research and a decade of professional practice to develop urban design courses that integrate knowledge of urban history and theory, social research methods, and planning ethics with skills in physical design, spatial analysis, and visual representation. Through studio-based pedagogies, she combines theoretical, professional, and visual expertise to strengthen planning education and cultivate reflective, imaginative practitioners.
At UIUC, Dr. Chiu-Shee contributes to transdisciplinary program development by building connections across planning and related fields. Beyond the university, she advances justice-centered, anti-racist, and decolonial scholarship and supports global and cross-cultural perspectives. She has served as an International Expert supporting China’s international collaborations on environment and development and as a Member of the National Committee on United States–China Relations.
Education
- Ph.D. in Urban and Environmental Planning and Design, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
- Master of Science in Architectural Studies, Washington University in St. Louis
- Master of Urban Design, Washington University in St. Louis
- Master of Architecture, Washington University in St. Louis
- Bachelor of Architecture, Zhejiang University, China
Research and publications
Ongoing and upcoming research
Ongoing and upcoming research
Utopia(nism), hope, and futures thinking
Imagination, policy, and practice of green and smart urban futures
Tensions between the city and nature in urban (re)development
Global mobility of ecological ideas and urbanisms
Cross-cultural practice, research, and education
Selected publications
Chiu-Shee, Colleen (2026). “Commoning Civics. Inclusion as Innovation in Privatized China: Pursuing Openness, Coexistence, and Ownership Against the Grain.” In T. Hatuka and L. J. Vale (eds.), Designing Signals of Inclusion: A Framework for Fostering Shared Neighborhoods. Routledge, 191-209.
Samper, Jota, Colleen Chiu-Shee, and Carmelo Ignaccolo (2026). “Decoding Inclusion: Process, Politics, and Ethics of Signaling.” In T. Hatuka and L. J. Vale (eds.), Designing Signals of Inclusion: A Framework for Fostering Shared Neighborhoods. Routledge, 259-273.
Knox-Hayes, Janelle, Surbhi Agarwal, Johan Arango-Quiroga, Nicholas Ashford, David Birge, Gabriella Carolini, Shekhar Chandra, Colleen Chiu-Shee et al.et al. (2025). The Equitable Resilience Framework: An Environmental Justice Strategy for Community-Led Resilience Planning. World Development Perspectives, 40:100738.
Chiu-Shee, C. (2024) Rethinking enclosed neighbourhoods: vital infrastructure for design innovation, civic engagement, and biopower in urban China. Built Environment, 50(1), pp. 54–72. DOI: 10.2148/benv.50.1.54
Chiu-Shee, Colleen and Linda Shi (2024). Navigating Cultural Difference in Planning: How Cross-Border Adaptation Nurtured Cosmopolitan Competence Among U.S.-Taught Chinese Practitioners. Journal of the American Planning Association, 90:4, 642-655. DOI: 10.1080/01944363.2023.2290499
Shi, Linda and Colleen Chiu-Shee (2023). Taught in America I: How Does an American Planning Education Serve Mainland Chinese Students? Journal of Planning Education and Research. DOI: 10.1177/0739456X221148197
Chiu-Shee, Colleen (2022). Green cities beyond failure: Towards hopeful epistemologies of ecological urban futures. ARIscope. (Link)
Chiu-Shee, Colleen, Brent Ryan, and Lawrence Vale (2021). Ending Gated Communities: the Rationales for Resistance in China. Housing Studies, DOI: 10.1080/02673037.2021.1950645
Chiu-Shee, Colleen, Ningdi Wei, and Siqi Zheng (2020). “Chapter 6. Zhengdong: the ‘Metabolic’ and ‘Eco-Smart’ Approaches to Long-Term Vibrancy.” In S. Zheng, J. Wu and Z. Tan (eds.), Towards Urban Economic Vibrancy: Patterns and Practices in Asia’s New Cities. Cambridge: MIT Press, 109-132.
Tan, Shin Bin, Colleen Chiu-Shee, and Duarte Fabio (2019). From SARS to COVID-19: Digital infrastructures of surveillance and segregation in exceptional times. Cities, DOI: 10.1016/j.cities.2021.103486
Chiu-Shee, Colleen, and Siqi Zheng (2019). A Burden or A Tool? Rationalizing Public Housing Provision in Chinese Cities. Housing Studies, 36:4, 500-543. DOI: 10.1080/02673037.2019.1667490
Chiu-Shee, Colleen (2019). Reinventing the Collective for Ethical Design: The Theoretical Confluences of Fumihiko Maki’s Collective Form and Thom Mayne’s Combinatory Urbanism. Architecture Research/ Arhitektura, Raziskave (Vol. Confluences/Stekanja): 209-241. (Link)