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Huanyu Wang
About me
I am a PhD researcher in APL at Newcastle University. My work explores environmental justice, urban green-space governance, and the lived experiences of residents in disadvantaged communities.
I am particularly interested in how planning, policy, and everyday practices shape equity, wellbeing, and the quality of urban environments.
Project Title
The exploration of the impact of Green Space on Residents in the context of Environmental justice in the UK
Project Description
My research investigates how governance models influence the quality, accessibility, and everyday experience of urban green spaces in socioeconomically disadvantaged areas.
Planning to have the fieldwork in the North East of England, the project examines how funding, maintenance, and participation structures shape environmental justice outcomes.
Abstract
This PhD project examines how urban green-space governance shapes the everyday use, perceptions, and sense of belonging of residents living in disadvantaged areas in the North East of England.
While green spaces are widely recognised as essential for health, wellbeing, and social cohesion, their quality and accessibility remain deeply uneven.
The research investigates how different governance models, ranging from local authority management to charitable trusts, volunteer groups, and hybrid partnerships, affect maintenance standards, funding stability, community involvement, and long-term ecological quality.
It explores how people perceive the safety, usability, and identity of their local green spaces, and how these perceptions reflect broader structural conditions including austerity, market-led planning, and inequalities in political representation.
The project also interrogates the extent to which residents feel included or excluded from decision-making processes, and how everyday “lived governance” practices shape their interactions with public space.
By foregrounding distributive, procedural, and recognition-based dimensions of environmental justice, the research aims to explain why lower-income communities experience poorer-quality green spaces and to identify governance practices that support more inclusive, equitable, and resilient urban green-space futures."
Supervisors
Qualifications
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Master of Landscape Architecture, Illinois Institute of Technology, 2024
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Bachelor of Landscape Architecture, Engineering, Southeast University, 2020
Contact
E-mail: h.wang116@newcastle.ac.uk