Lingchen Kong: The Cognitive Steppe: Placemaking, Networks, and Cultural Persistence in Urban Hohhot

Supervisor: Dr. Felipe Hernández

Research overview:

Lingchen's research examines how urban Mongolians in Hohhot perceive, navigate, and produce cultural space within a city shaped by state spatial governance and rapid urban transformation. Rather than treating Mongolian spatial practices as remnants of a pastoral past, the study investigates how residents actively sustain networks of cultural belonging through everyday uses of the city: where they gather, how they move, and what spaces they invest with meaning.

Methodologically, the study combines participatory co-mapping workshops, walking interviews, and semi-structured interviews, drawing on sensory mapping techniques to surface spatial knowledge that conventional cartography overlooks. The research contributes to discussions on ethnic placemaking and architecture's role in sociopolitical belonging, offering an account of how a minority community sustains cultural spatial practices within a rapidly transforming Chinese city.

Biography:

Lingchen Kong is an urban designer and researcher, currently a PhD student at the University of Cambridge under the supervision of Dr. Felipe Hernández. His research explores the spatial modernity of Mongolian communities and their embodied, everyday political dissent against state policies that seek to assimilate them and redefine what it means to be Mongolian. Lingchen holds an MPhil in Architecture and Urban Studies from University of Cambridge, an MArch in Urban Design from University College London, and a BEng from Hebei University of Technology. His academic interests lie at the intersection of architectural history, Indigenous architecture, and the spatial manifestations of cultural identity.