Events

We are organising a series of events including workshops, seminars and conferences to gather thoughts, inspire research and disseminate outputs.
The inaugural ‘BeNeLux Geography‘ conference, 8 – 10 April 2026, Leuven, Belgium.

Funded by the ERC project, Miss Handuo Deng participated in the inaugural “BeNeLux Geography” conference at KU Leuven, Belgium, in 8-10 April 2026. On 8 April, Handuo Deng attended the workshop ‘Towards powerful and impactful teaching in geography.’ On 9 April, Handuo Deng presented her research on Chengdu’s ecological spaces governance as a state project in the session ‘Urban imaginaries: critique, alternatives & change.’

The presentation was based on two papers on Chengdu collaborated by Handuo Deng, Prof. Fulong Wu, and Fangzhu Zhang. They viewed Chengdu’s Eco-zone governance as a state project, which created massive peri-urban green spaces advancing the political visions surrounding long-term economic strategy, national security, and ruling. The visions transcend the capitalist logic of accumulation. The state translates territorial logic into urban realities through strategical embeddedness and tactical mobilisation (Deng et al., 2025, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers). Echoing post-colonial scholarship’s critiques on the hegemonic use of ‘urban entrepreneurialism’ as an Anglo-American-centred concept (Halbert and Rouanet, 2014; Robinson et al., 2022; Theurillat and Zhang, 2025), they propose that Chinese state entrepreneurialism can conceptually inspire more diverse ‘statist forms of entrepreneurialism’ in specifically configured territorial political contexts (Deng et al., 2025, Urban Geography).

Photo by CPRG