Dr. Andrew Stokols received his PhD in urban planning and political economy at MIT, where his research examined how urban technologies (smart cities, IoT, 5G, AI) are being shaped in an era of geopolitical competition. Andrew’s dissertation Building Digital Cities, with cases in China, Singapore, and Thailand explores how states and companies are using urban development to directly deploy new technological systems and incubate emerging industries such as artificial intelligence and internet of things (ioT).
Previously he was research director for ETH Future Cities Lab Singapore, worked at World Resources Institute in Washington D.C., and as research director at Peking University’s Ecological urbanism center. He has a Master’s degree in urban planning from Harvard graduate school of design and a Bachelor’s from UC-Berkeley in Chinese history and urban planning, and has been a visiting Fulbright Scholar at Xi’an University of Architecture and Technology. Currently Andrew is a lecturer and postdoctoral fellow at MIT.
His academic research has been published in University of Pennsylvania Press; Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economies, Societies; Journal of Urban Affairs; Urban Geography; Environment and Planning A.
Andrew is an internationally recognized expert on Chinese urbanization and digital innovation, and has been interviewed by publications such as CNN, Bloomberg, NPR’s Marketplace, El Pais, Sinica Podcast, and The Wire China. He has been a contributing writer for Foreign Policy, The China Project, Jamestown’s China Brief, and Germany’s Table Briefings, and The Atlantic.
He runs the substack Sinocities, which has 2,000 subscribers across diplomacy, business, and academic China-watching and urbanist communities.
Andrew’s current research explores the varieties of digital urbanism emerging throughout the world, drawing on the perspectives of political science, science and technology studies (STS), and urban theory to explore the co-evolution of urban space and digital technologies, and the ways in which national governments increasingly use urban development to incubate new economic sectors and project national power. Some main questions/goals of this research are:
How do the policies of rapidly developing countries use urban development as a means to fostering new economic sectors, and how do legacies of prior rounds of development (such as so-called “developmental state” traditions, or institutional cultures) impact current economic policy around digital urbanism in specific countries?
Do these “variations” provide more state-centric alternatives to a private-sector-driven digital urbanism dominated by so-called “platform” companies? How do such approaches compare on metrics of equity, inclusivity, and environmental sustainability?
How do new city projects in Asia integrate technology in natural environments, and what are the ideological and political implications of such “techno-natural” assemblages?
