Chun Zheng

PhD in Transition Design

Chun is a fourth-year PhD student in Transition Design. Her doctoral research concerns the opportunities and challenges of commoning practices in urban spaces and the comparison of spaces of commonality in western and eastern contexts.

Chun has been the teaching assistant for courses like Case Studies in Architecture and Cities, GIS/CAFM–Spatial Analysis in Infrastructure Planning, and Urban Design Studio. In the past four years, she, as a research assistant, has been dedicated to the traveling exhibition An Atlas of Commoning. She co-curated the digital exhibition A dialogue must take place, precisely because we don't speak the same language, in the context of the Tbilisi Architecture Biennial and continues developing the project with the support from the research fellowship M.A.P.P. (Methods, Affects, & Practical Pedagogies) program at the School of Commons in Zurich University of the Arts.

Chun's PhD research is supported by China Scholarship Council(CSC) doctoral fellowship. She worked as a Community Design Associate in the Design Center Pittsburgh in 2017, collaborating with local communities to co-design creative solutions for their socio-environmental issues. She is also a Permaculture Institute of North America(PINA) certified permaculture designer. She holds a Master's degree in Urban Design from the School of Architecture, CMU and a Bachelor of Engineering in Landscape Architecture from Tongji University, Shanghai. 

Research interests:

• Urban commons, bottom-up urban design
• The spatiality/materiality of commoning practices
• Urban agriculture and food ecology
• Design thinking in Chinese history