Trustee tenure: 2024-Present
Department of Geography, Durham University
Lower Mountjoy, South Rd
Durham DH1 3LEº
United Kingdom
Yimin.zhao@durham.ac.uk | Profile at Durham University | Readcities Project
Dr Yimin Zhao is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography at Durham University. As an urban geographer, Yimin’s research mainly explores urban peripheries and the spatial politics of urban change in China and Southeast Asia through the analytical lenses of language, materiality, and everyday life. His current research focuses on three themes: the transformation of urban peripheries, the political economy of urbanism and Global China, and the spatial politics of urban control. The first research stream examines the spatio-temporalities of urban transformation, particularly how the urban has been produced on the dynamic peripheries of Asian cities. The second line of inquiry takes China as a method to examine how and how far “Chinese urbanism” has been produced “glocally.” More recently, after witnessing the intense deforming of the “urban” in Chinese cities, he has been developing the third line of research on the logic of control in authoritarian urbanism.
Yimin is an editor of City and a corresponding editor of the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research. He co-edits The Urbanising Dynamics of Global China (Routledge, 2025), an edited volume adapted from the special issue of the same title published in Urban Geography. Yimin is also keen on knowledge mobilization to make critical urban studies more inclusive, geographically and linguistically. He founded and has been co-editing 城识UrbanSense, a WeChat-based social media platform that aims to promote critical urban thinking, co-produce urban knowledges, and develop early-career researcher networks among Chinese readers both in and beyond China.