Dawei Li

Academic Qualifications

Oct 2010- January 2014 PhD in Urban Design The University of Sheffield

Scholarship and Awards to sponsor PhD research:
UK- China Scholarships for Excellence
UK BIS Award
Fee Waiver Scholarship

September 2005-January 2008 Master of Arts in Landscape Design The University of Sheffield

September 1999-July 2003 Bachelor of Engineering in Urban Planning Beijing Forestry University

Biography

Before transferring my career focus to an academic PhD programme, I was a senior landscape architect/ urban designer, working for over 6 years in top design practices focusing on planning/ Landscape/ Urban design both in the UK and China. I hold Licentiate membership of the UK Landscape Institute and am currently on my P2C programme. Since working in the UK one of the projects I have been involved with, the 2012 Olympic parkland and public realm, received the Peter Youngman Award. Projects that I was involved with in China also received awards, including the Chinese Landscape Institute Award and Excellent Landscape Project Award.

After gaining experience in international practices I felt more interested in urban design which led me to pursue academic research at PhD level in urban design area. The benefits of carrying out this research will, firstly give me time to summarise the experiences and lessons learnt from practical work into a theoretical framework; secondly give me the opportunity to deeply consider solving the problems I met during practical work; and thirdly further my understanding of theoretical frameworks and relevant issues to enhance my design ability for future work. Therefore I decided to go back to start my academic study and fortunately I got three scholarships which gave me a good start and strong financial support for my PhD research.

I am currently a student ambassador for the Architecture and Landscape Graduate School and I am also the research student representative of the Landscape Department academic committee. In addition to this I am working part-time as a senior consultant in a design practice at present.

PhD Research

PhD Title

The development of new design guidelines for socially beneficial urban public squares in Chinese metropolis.

PhD Supervisors

Thwaites, Dr Kevin
Woolley, Ms Helen

PhD Research Introduction

In contemporary China, there is one phenomenon related to usage of urban public space emerging after the late of 20th Century: many existing and newly established squares in China are not used by people as frequently as designers or developers had expected. Many existing squares in the Chinese metropolis appear over grand, sameness, cheerless more than attractive and welcomed. Therefore a number of them seemed to be used by citizens more as corridors rather than a positive core place to enjoy their urban public social life currently. In another words, the public squares doesn’t appear remarkable contribution to encourage/sustain public social life as much as the designers imagined. This implies the existing squares are designed with social value in mind but they don’t appear to achieve this in reality.
This problem above indicates although the ‘Public Square’ in China has been recognized and designed as an important part of urban open public space in this globalized times, they appear to neither encourage nor support diversity of urban social life, especially when compared to the social value of precedents that can be found in western countries. There could be a number of reasons for this, including: that the wider social potential of public squares and the issue of changing culture of Chinese citizens which will result in the change of social needs and usage of urban squares, have not been considered in planning and design processes, or if it has, that the western urban development models which influence them have been misunderstood or narrowly interpreted; that Chinese citizens are not culturally accustomed to using the public squares above for a variety of social purposes as western countries’ citizens and that therefore there is a mismatch of expectation between providers of public squares and users of them.

Therefore seeking the reasons result in the problems above and finding a way of how to handle design to encourage and sustain the diversity of urban public activities in order to enhancing the social value of urban public space in current China are the key objectives of the research.