Astrid Jing Weinberg
Astrid Jing Weinberg is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is passionate about building happier, healthier, and more equitable cities. Her research interests include urban policies, strategies, and design interventions that provide socio-economic opportunities for people through places, as well as developing methods to integrate understanding of the built environment on human well-being into decision-making. Her current research focuses on developing (digital) methods to assist older adults in participating in planning processes to capture the social value of places. This work will elaborate on place-based policy for strengthening social infrastructure in local communities.
In Jing Weinberg’s prior practice, she has worked as a professional architect, urban designer, curator, and consultant for over a decade, with multiple stakeholders (governmental, private, and civic). She has led various projects in China, Sweden, and internationally, on topics ranging from industrial heritage conservation and renovation to urban parks development and regional planning for sustainable tourism. Those experiences motivated her to research how urban policy and the design of the built environment can contribute to enhanced well-being for a wider portion of the population.
Jing Weinberg’s book The Built Environment for Children: The Stockholm Experience (2016) was an early seed of change contributing to the Child-friendly Cities urban policy and a scheme of pilot projects in 100 cities (2021) enacted by China’s National Development and Reform Commission. She is also the assistant editor of the award-winning (2018) book In the Post-Urban World, Emergent Transformation of Cities and Regions in the Innovative Global Economy. Her translation work Crucial Words: Conditions for Contemporary Architecture (2022), featuring 31 original essays by, to name a few, Denise Scott Brown, Kenneth Frampton, Vittorio Magnago Lampugnani, Hans Ibelings, Juhani Pallasmaa, Joseph Rykwert, Axel Sowa, and Nobel laureate Ohran Pamuk, is published by Tongji University Press as one of the four books in a collection of western architectural literature under the rubric: Reflections of the Logic behind the Form.
Jing Weinberg earned her Ph.D. from KTH Royal Institute of Technology. Her dissertation entitled See and Be Seen: An Inquiry into the Role of Public Space in Combating Loneliness is the first of its kind, in the Swedish context, to address loneliness from an urban design and planning perspective. Jing Weinberg holds an M.Sc. (Sustainable Urban Planning and Design) from KTH and an M.A. (Environmental Design) from HUST Huazhong University of Science and Technology, China, where she received a dual BA (Architecture and Engineering).
