Piper Gaubatz is an urban geographer with research experience in China, Japan and the United States, a background in sociology, architecture and Chinese studies from Princeton University (B.A. 1984) and geography from the University of California, Berkeley (M.A. 1986, Ph.D. 1989), and language skills in both Chinese and Japanese. She is an associate professor of geography. Since 1986, she has conducted seven major field research projects in China, Japan and the United States, and she is continuing fieldwork-based research projects in all three countries. Her 1986-88 fieldwork in China provided the basis for her book Beyond the Great Wall: Urban Form and Transformation on the Chinese Frontiers (Stanford University Press, 1996, 378 pp.), and she is currently preparing a book manuscript based on her 1992-99 China fieldwork, Globalization, Urban Development, and Urban Change in the Reform Era.
She began her research career working on U.S. urban issues with fieldwork for a senior thesis at Princeton University on community participation in planning and an MA thesis at the University of California, Berkeley on neighborhood change in what is today a predominately African-American neighborhood in Oakland, California. She continues to conduct research in the U.S., and is currently examining urban change and high-tech industrial development in Silicon Valley. Beginning with her dissertation (1989), however, she has made the study of East Asian urban geography her major research focus.
Her approach to geographical theory and research is grounded in a critical reading of cities as representations of power, knowledge, culture and society within and beyond the urban community. She has drawn on the work of a wide range of urbanists to develop an integrative approach to urban analysis. She is actively involved in an international interdisciplinary effort (the International Seminar on Urban Form) produce a "new urban morphology" which builds upon the geographical traditions of urban morphology (the analysis of urban form) as practiced by M.R.G. Conzen, Saverio Muratori and James Vance and engages with current geographic thought by moving beyond early urban morphology's focus on the physical structures of the city to reconceptualize urban form as the spatial expression of an integrated set of relationships between global, national, and local political, economic, social, and cultural forces, the built form of the city and urban ecology.
Research Projects:
(click on the links below)