Speaker
Description
The transnational flow of planning knowledge has gradually become a research hotspot since the late 20th century against the trends of the globalization of planning and EU integration. Various interdisciplinary terms have been used to describe this phenomenon, such as "cross-national learning" and "policy mobilization" in politics study, and "knowledge flow" in management study. Some findings focus on the actors and their activities involved in the transnational knowledge flow. It is specifically highlighted that planning scholars, as the main actors and most direct participants, often disseminate their planning knowledge through academic activities like conferences, lectures, exhibitions, and competitions.
There has been an increase in terms of the number of scholars and the degree of involvement in international academic activities among Chinese planning scholars since China proposed the "Belt and Road" initiative in 2013. Attending international conferences is one of the key academic activities that effectively promotes the transnational planning knowledge flow. Against this backdrop, our research examines Chinese planning scholars' involvement in international conferences, aiming at exploring the content and influential factors of transnational knowledge flow. Employing data crawling and natural language processing techniques, we collect and analyze two types of data. 1) A mandatory requirement was released by the Chinese Ministry of Education at the end of 2015, entitled "Information Disclosure on Temporary Official Overseas Trips", which stipulated that an official announcement should be released online on each international academic activity made by Chinese scholars. In terms of this requirement, we search the websites of universities with urban planning programs to gather data on scholars’ attendance in international conferences. 2) We search for keywords in the Web of Science, specifically the Conference Proceedings Citation Index, to collect international conference papers published by Chinese planning scholars between 2016 and 2024.
Based on the data above, our research explores the content of knowledge dissemination, its regional distribution trends, and the influential factors during scholars' involvement in conferences. The data analysis shows that Chinese scholars disseminate planning knowledge on many topics or issues, including natural resource management, rural governance, regional development planning, digital city construction, and cultural heritage preservation, among others. Furthermore, the transnational knowledge flow has clear regional characteristics: neighboring countries in the Asia-Pacific region are the primary areas for knowledge dissemination, followed by the United States and Northwestern Europe as the secondary regions. In addition, factors such as planning formulation, changes in national development strategies, shifts in academic trends, and economic changes have all impacted the transnational knowledge flow. Our research also reveals that although there has been some progress in the transnational flow of Chinese planning knowledge, it still faces numerous challenges, including cultural differences, language barriers, and policy differences between different countries. The findings offer useful insights for European scholars studying planning policies and practices related to European knowledge spillover and EU integration.
| Keywords | knowledge flow; planning knowledge; actors; academic activities |
|---|---|
| Best Congress Paper Award | Yes |
