On the afternoon of June 16, 2023, Dr. Sun Guibo, Assistant Professor at the Department of Urban Planning and Design, Director of the Urban Analysis and Intervention Research Laboratory, and doctoral supervisor at the University of Hong Kong, was invited by the Center for Urban Development and Land Policy at Peking University-Lincoln Institute, to give an academic lecture titled "Assessing the Social, Economic, and Health Impacts of Large-scale Urban Transportation Infrastructure Using Natural Experiments." The lectures attracted active participation from faculty, students, and related practitioners from multiple universities.
Dr. Sun Guibo's lecture introduced natural experimental research methods and explored the causal pathways of large-scale urban transportation infrastructure interventions affecting social, economic, and health conditions.
Dr. Sun Guibo first explained the research design of natural experimental methods. By comparing the differences among traditional observational research, natural experiments, and stochastic control experiments, he analyzed how natural experiments perform causal inference. In the research and design of nature experiments, he believes that substantial knowledge of large-scale urban interventions (such as new subways and urban renewal) is even more necessary for planning and design professionals to discover rigorous natural experiment designs.
Dr. Sun then cited the recent work of his research team at the Urban Analysis and Intervention Research Laboratory (https://www.ulab.hku.hk) at the University of Hong Kong to analyze how natural experimental methods can be used to study the impact of large-scale transportation infrastructure on society, the economy, and residents' health and well-being。 He proposed that in conducting natural experiments, it is more important to focus on the process and causes behind behavioral data generation, which can promote large-scale urban intervention impact assessments ranging from correlation analysis to causal inference.
The lecture concluded with a Q&A session. Participants from diverse disciplinary backgrounds actively asked questions and engaged in lively interactions with Dr. Sun on the site about the impact of natural experimental methods on carbon reduction policies, government markets and society, and changes over time.
This lecture was hosted by Professor He Canfei, Dean of the School of Urban and Environmental Sciences at Peking University.
Contributor | Li Yunhe
Photography by Fang Jiawen, Li Yunhe
