Jiaxiu Cai is an Assistant Professor at the School of Architecture of the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK). She is a scholar practitioner and a practice-oriented scholar working at the intersection of landscape, urbanism, and architecture. She has exerted herself to develop design methodologies and tools to enlighten, inspire and assist urban designers in the design process. Her research and teaching uncover how designers reason, how practices are changing, and how new technologies play a role in practices. These insights feed into teaching and learning in Urban and Landscape Design Education. This results in 1) generating effective design instruments for practice (both human-based and computational ) and 2) providing new insights of Landscape and Urbanism. Prior to CUHK, she was an Assistant Professor of Urban Design at Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen. She also taught design studios at various architecture schools, such as TU Delft, KU Leuven, Napoli Federico II, HUST, etc, and practiced in internationally renowned offices ThomsonAdsett and KCAP.
Jiaxiu’s first book, Design with Forms as well as Patterns (2018), demonstrates how the morphological approach in combination with the pattern language approach assist urban designers to achieve historical continuity in urban design both on theory and application levels. Her second book,together with Professor Henco Bekkering, Mapping Wuhan: Morphological Atlas of the Urbanization of a Chinese City (2021), applies the Delft school of morphological approach, reveals Wuhan transformation and distills its spatial structural elements intending to assist decision-making on the city’s future development. Her edited special issue in Landscape Architecture, together with Professor GUO Wei, Mapping and Design of the Urban Landscape (2022), has invited notable international scholars and designer to showcase mapping research and projects across the continents. Her two ongoing research projects: 1) Transitional Adaptive Territories: Urban-Rural Landscape as a Tool to Enhance Sustainable Development focuses on the Northern New Territory and its adjacent cities Hongkong-Shenzhen; and 2) Mapping the Urban-Rural Landscape System in Pearl River Delta reveals the structural changes due to urbanization and distills the underlying spatial mechanism across scales.
