Cornell AAP CRP News

Hospitality, real estate in China set to boom, summit finds

Fri, 10 May 2013 15:05:27 +0000

The future lies in China’s emerging middle class, concluded participants at the Cornell International Summit: Hospitality, Real Estate, and the Built Environment, at the Waldorf Astoria Shanghai on the Bund, April 20.

Cornell faculty, international business leaders, Shanghai Vice Mayor Zhao Wen, and other Chinese government officials gathered to examine the state of China's hospitality and commercial real estate markets and discuss current trends, challenges, and opportunities.

“In 10 years’ time, the middle class in China will be twice as large as the middle class in the U.S., and it will have twice the purchasing power,” said Keith Barr ’92, CEO of IHG Greater China, during a panel on service.

This growth is pushing Chinese domestic hotel companies to build brands and is driving international companies to bring brands to China. The emerging middle class is also spurring a dramatic increase in the number of hotel rooms in the country.

“Currently, there are about 2.5 million hotel rooms in China. We will see this number expand beyond the 5 million or so in North America to about 7.5 million in a decade,” said Leland C. Pillsbury ’69, cochairman and CEO of Thayer Lodging Group. “The implications for real estate development around that are enormous.”

Many hotel executives on the program confirmed that China is the fastest growing region for their brands. They also explained how future progress will differ from past development; today, companies are planning significant growth in secondary and tertiary cities and are focusing on three- and four-star properties. Historically, international brands have been successful in China’s luxury segment, while domestic companies have succeeded in the budget sector.

During the panel on urban interconnectedness, moderator Kent Kleinman, AAP Gale and Ira Drukier Dean, noted that more than 50 percent of the world population already lives in cities. A sustainable future will mean fundamental changes in the ways cities and buildings are designed and how density is managed. Michael Manville, assistant professor of city and regional planning, noted that new technologies can fight traffic congestion; and Jenny Sabin, assistant professor of architecture, described her work applying biology and mathematics to the design of material structures.

Teddy Zhang ’97, president and CEO of HUBS1, moderated a panel on the future of the Chinese hotel marketplace and explained: “One of the very successful investments in the lodging industry is the budget sector. This is the first truly domestic hotel group in China that can grow and compete with international brands.”

Half of the 275 summit attendees were Cornell alumni, and 14 faculty, and staff attended from across the university; the conference included 39 speakers.

“The diversity of stakeholders who participated in the summit allowed us to look at China’s development and urbanization from many different angles,” said Michael D. Johnson, dean and E.M. Statler Professor at the School of Hotel Administration (SHA). “Our expert panelists discussed everything from the concerns of international versus domestic companies to how consumer preferences are changing, to the ways technology improvements in transportation, and building design will redefine the cities of the future.”

The summit — which was copresented by the SHA, AAP, and Cornell’s Center for Real Estate and Finance — was held in collaboration with the Cornell Asia-Pacific Leadership Conference and the Cornell Hotel Society Asia Pacific Regional Meeting.

The next Cornell International Hospitality Summit will be held in São Paulo, Brazil, in 2014.

By Ashlee McGandy, staff writer at Cornell’s School of Hotel Administration

CRP faculty news updates

Fri, 03 May 2013 16:17:00 +0000

Associate Professor Victoria Beard has been accepted into the Engaged Learning and Research Faculty Fellowship Program, a year-long faculty cohort program designed to significantly enhance the capacity of Cornell faculty to conduct courses and develop research projects which directly engage the university with the community. She plans to use this opportunity to offer an international development workshop course in spring 2014. Beard also presented a paper to the World Bank in January, titled “Using M&E to Support Performance Based Planning and Budgeting in Indonesia.”

Susan Christopherson, professor, as recently appointed to the National Research Council’s new Committee on Risk Management and Governance Issues in Shale Gas Development. Over the next year, the group, which is funded by the National Science Foundation, will organize two workshops to “examine the range of social and decision-making issues in risk characterization and governance related to gas shale development,” according to the committee’s website.

In February, the Community and Regional Development Institute’s (CaRDI) 2012–13 David J. Allee and Paul R. Eberts Community and Economic Vitality Award was presented to Professor Mildred Warner for her years of innovative research on issues impacting families, communities, and regions. The award was given at CaRDI’s Research Roundtable seminar titled “Planning Across Generations.” Another presentation by Warner, this one at the Mayor’s Innovation Project in Washington, DC, in January, prompted syndicated columnist Neal Peirce to feature multi-generational planning in his weekly column on cities. “Cities for All: No Skipping Generations,” appeared on January 24 on citiwire.net.

Student sustainability group wins award for South Africa school project

Thu, 11 Apr 2013 15:00:50 +0000

Two years after 26 Cornell students spent their summer building an early childhood development center in a new residential community in Johannesburg, South Africa, the project has received an award in an international architecture competition.

The 6,000-square-foot school, designed by second-year architecture students and developed by Cornell University Sustainable Design (CUSD), won the Popular Choice award for the student design-build category in the competition sponsored by Architizer, an international architecture website. Entries from more than 100 countries were submitted for the 2013 competition.

“We have been honored by many humanitarian and educational awards, but this is our first award based on design,” says Karen Chi-Chi Lin (B.Arch. ’13), who traveled to South Africa twice to work on the project. “It's really great to be honored by a design award.”

The center, which relies on passive energy instead of electricity, was selected by judges of the Architizer A+ Awards as one of the top five projects in the student design-build category. Viewers of the Architizer website then were invited to vote on projects in more than 50 categories to select the Popular Choice winners.

Andrew Fu (B.Arch. ’14), whose design for the school was selected by a group of Cornell professors, project partners, and CUSD team members, says the award will help promote the sustainable practices the students used in the project. One of those strategies was insulating the building with sandbags, which cools and heats the structure.

Another key aspect of its sustainability was the construction of a separate wing to train teachers, which will help provide a continuing supply of instructors for the school, located in Cosmo City, a mixed-housing development in Johannesburg. The center accommodates 80 children between the ages of 2 and 9.

CUSD began working on the schoolhouse project after representatives from Education Africa, a nonprofit organization working to reduce poverty through education, visited campus four years ago. Second-year architecture students in a studio class developed designs for the school, and Fu's proposal was selected in a multi-round class competition.

Peace Corps and Cornell renew, expand relationship

Fri, 05 Apr 2013 19:58:13 +0000

Peace Corps Acting Director Carrie Hessler-Radelet visited Cornell on April 5 to talk about relationships: bonds between volunteers and the people in their host countries, and partnerships between the Peace Corps and Cornell.

While on campus Hessler-Radelet met with deans and leaders of all the colleges at Cornell to expand and strengthen the Peace Corps program university-wide; she also participated in a symposium highlighting the many years of collaboration between the Peace Corps and the university.

Hessler-Radelet and President David Skorton signed a memorandum of agreement (MOA) for a new Peace Corps/Cornell Paul D. Coverdell Fellowship for returned Peace Corps volunteers seeking a master of professional studies degree in the field of global development in International Programs in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences (IP-CALS). The new MOA joins the one established in 2008 for Master of Regional Planning Program in the AAP‘s Department of City and Regional Planning.

“The core strength of our volunteers is the relationships they build within the communities they serve,” she told an audience at the City and Regional Planning Colloquium in Milstein Hall.

Hessler-Radelet explained that her own call to service sprang from a question her grandmother asked her: “What are you going to do with your one life?” The answer to that question has led her to a lifetime of public service, starting as a Peace Corps volunteer and now serving as the acting director. Through her service, Hessler-Radelet has seen firsthand how important relationships are in the work of Peace Corps volunteers. “The best-intentioned plans will not work,” she said, “if our volunteers do not cultivate meaningful relationships in the communities where they serve.”

The benefits of these relationships are not only felt within the communities but also reverberate within the life of the volunteer. “Serving in the Peace Corps is a transformative experience. Living in another country creates a unique perspective for the Peace Corps volunteer. It is this enriched perspective of other cultures that is very necessary in today’s world,” Hessler-Radelet said.

The relationship between Cornell and the Peace Corps started 50 years ago when 18 Cornell alumni became Peace Corps volunteers. Since then nearly 1,600 Cornell alumni have served in the Peace Corps. With the signing of the MOA, the partnership of IP-CALS and the Peace Corps continues to grow with the expansion of the Paul D. Coverdell Fellows Program to CALS. In this program, a Returned Peace Corps Volunteer (RPCV) attends graduate school to pursue a masters of professional studies followed by an internship in a local New York community.

The program between the Peace Corps and IP-CALS and CRP allows Cornell to attract the best RPCV’s and international development students. “Having a university like Cornell make such a commitment to the Peace Corps is a strong endorsement of the academic value of real-world experience,” said Marshall McCormick (M.R.P. ’13), Cornell Peace Corps Coordinator and a RPCV.

Also recognizing the importance of relationships cultivated during his service, McCormick said, “The work that I did in Peace Corps allowed me to reassess the ways that I measure the changes I can have in our world and encouraged me to focus on finding ways to create an impact based on the relationships that I build with others.”

Looking toward the future, Hessler-Radelet emphasized the value of the relationships that Peace Corps volunteers accumulate and how those experiences continue to reap rewards. “Returned Peace Corps Volunteers give so much back to the United States when they return from service. In many ways, their service doesn’t end when they come home. Our country needs people that speak different languages and understand different cultures to help solve the most intractable global problems. Peace Corps volunteers help everyone work together as one united humanity.”

By John Bakum, IP-CALS

Parking Is Hell: A New Freakonomics Radio Podcast

Thu, 14 Mar 2013 19:54:53 +0000

CRP assistant professor Michael Manville's paper, "The Price Doesn't Matter if You Don't Have to Pay: Legal Exemptions and Market-Priced Parking," was cited in a Freakonomics podcast titled, "Parking is Hell."

Cornell team receives honorable mention in urban design competition

Mon, 11 Mar 2013 19:58:46 +0000

A multidisciplinary team of Cornell students has received honorable mention in the 2013 ULI Gerald D. Hines Urban Design Competition. The juried competition selected the team’s project from among 149 entries representing 70 universities in the U.S. and Canada.

The annual competition is an urban design and development project for teams comprised of five students representing at least three disciplines. This year’s challenge focused on transforming an undeveloped expanse at the edge Minneapolis’s downtown near the new Minnesota Vikings stadium.

The team describes their project, LOOPolis, as being about “completion, connectivity, and community.” Their goal was to plan a vibrant mixed-use neighborhood. “It’s about honoring past visions for a complete downtown, for a continuous greenway circling the city, and for new centers of opportunity for families, businesses, and college graduates, while envisioning anew and closing the loop on what downtown Minneapolis could become,” states the team in their project summary.

The team included: Man Su (B.Arch. ’13), Jia Li (M.R.P. ’14), Qianqian Ye ’14 and Yang Chen ’14 both graduate students in the landscape architecture program, and Bret Molan Colazzi ’13 who is a graduate student at the Johnson School. H. Pike Olive, CRP, and Marc Miller, landscape architecture, advised this team as well as six other Cornell teams. This was the first year that B.Arch. students were able to participate in the competition, which had previously been reserved for graduate students.