Gifted with the rare ability to engagingly present complex research, Karen Seto led students and faculty through the backstreets of urban development in China and India on Thursday in the Baker Center.
“I’ve been working in China and India for about 15 years, and what I have been doing is … a lot of it is footwork,” Seto said. “What is happening in China is very, very different from what is happening in India. In India, urban development is mainly driven by population growth. In China, we see economic growth driving urbanization.”
Seto, a professor of the urban environment at Yale, focuses her research on the intersection of urbanization and sustainability in the presence of global change. Her field of study is geography, and she uses empirical models to predict the potential expansion trajectories of urban developments. She believes modern industrialization must be viewed through a different lens than the industrialization of OECD nations.
“What drives land use changes is no longer local,” Seto said. “Across both countries, it’s not local actors, but global actors. We’ve been able to see that cities are in a competition for urban development. One firm comes in, and there’s a domino effect.”
In addition to her lecture, Seto took time during her stay to brainstorm with faculty members. She hinted that she might be working with UT faculty on new projects in the future.
“It was great intellectual fun, sitting around discussing things … it was very stimulating for us,” Carol Harden, professor of geography, said.
Much of Seto’s research relies on activity across different disciplines to understand changes in urbanization.
“We develop a lot of models, a lot of land-change models, to find if population drives these changes … or policy,” Seto said. “These methods are field based, and they’re lab based. We do a lot of interviews with the public and the private sector. Most of my research has been in Asia.”
She differentiated the development trajectories between nations.
“Urbanization in these nations, the process of urbanization … is fundamentally different from other places. China is in an intensive infrastructure development phase. India is just now beginning its urban transition, and its transition is supposed to peak in the second half of the 21st century. The drivers of development are very different.”
Seto sees much of modern development as a grassroots phenomenon.
“People tend to think that the government decides how cities are developed … but we have also found that in both of these countries there is little government capacity to affect how development will occur. In some parts of India, we have seen … more small-scale urban development.”
When asked for her normative thoughts on sustainability, Seto demurred.
“My job as a researcher is to provide information on the trade-offs,” Seto said. “I have opinions, but that’s for me to think about in my own time. The moment I say ‘you should do this,’ I lose credibility and access.”
Word of the lecture had clearly spread across the geography, economics and science departments, as extra seating had to be brought into the auditorium to accommodate the crowd.
“(It’s) wonderful to see a full house,” Matt Murray, director of the Baker Center, said.
Her lecture was part of the Baker Center Energy and Environment forum, co-sponsored by Tennessee Solar Conversion and Storage using Outreach, Research and Education (TN-SCORE).
