Professor Ying Jin

Ying Jin lectures on city planning, urban design, and urban modelling.  He is particularly interested in understanding how technology, policy and human behaviour affect the development of cities and their infrastructure, and in using this knowledge to create new design solutions.

His main research interests are computer models of cities, and urban history.  He has extensive industry experience and directed multi-disciplinary teams in building and using computer models as experimental platforms to appraise policy scenarios that involve investment, regulation, pricing and promotional campaigns.  Key projects include strategic planning of London and surrounding regions, sub-regional and local planning in the English Midlands, transport and energy scenarios for the European Union, long term city region and transport plans in China and in South America, mapping urban poverty in emerging economies, and assessing development and transport options for Cambridge and surrounding regions.  His interests in urban history lie mainly with the European Renaissance cities and the Chinese cities since the Tang Dynasty in the 7th Century.

At the Department of Architecture Professor Jin leads the Cities and Transport Research Group, which is one of the world’s leading centres in the creation and use of conceptual and practical models for cities and city-regions.  These models have been applied in policy and planning studies to assess novel designs of buildings, neighbourhoods, transport and energy systems.  The group’s past policy impacts were reviewed in a Cambridge University case study in REF2014. 

Among a wide range of research projects, Professor Jin leads the city-scale data science and urban modelling applications at the EPSRC Centre for Smart Infrastructure and Construction (CSIC 2011-2020).  He is the Principal Investigator for a research project to assess the alternative growth scenarios for the Combined Authority of Cambridgeshire and Peterborough, funded by the Combined Authority and Cambridge Ahead (2016-2020).  He is also a co-Investigator at the EPSRC research project Managing Air for Green Inner Cities (2016-2018), and the Smart Urban Design research project funded by the Cambridge-UC Berkeley-National University of Singapore Global Alliance initiative (2016-2018).  He is the lead convenor of the international symposia on Applied Urban Modelling since its launch in 2011.

Professor Jin is the current Director of the Martin Centre for Architectural and Urban Studies.

For more details and recent publications see Professor Jin's CV.  The papers are results from long term, productive collaborations with research colleagues and students across many disciplinary boundaries, with a focus to provide practical insights through advanced urban analytics and modelling.

Professor Jin leads the COVID-19 related modelling efforts from Cambridge on urban analytics and small spaces in the Royal Society’s Rapid Assistance in Modelling the Pandemic (RAMP) programme (https://epcced.github.io/ramp/). On related work he led regarding latent geography for commuting, see https://www.bennettinstitute.cam.ac.uk/blog/covid-19-and-commuting/