Cities and Communities

This piece was published in the 27th print volume of the Asian American Policy Review. The forces of gentrification have reached the gates of Chinatowns. Across America, upscale property developments threaten to encroach on venerable ethnic enclaves that happen to sit on very valuable real estate. While Chinatown gentrification in some ways repeats a pattern played […]

BY HAMADA ZAHAWI The windy, unpaved coastal road seemed to stretch forever. We were clearly lost, driving as we had been for miles in search of the almost mythical ‘Lifejacket Graveyard’ near Molyvos. We were in Greece as part of a group of 45 student volunteers from myriad countries, professions, and schools across Harvard—tasked with […]

BY HAIYANG ZHANG Over two thousand years ago during China’s Han dynasty, a Chinese imperial envoy blazed a land route via Central Asia that derived its name from the lucrative silk trade. Then, during the Ming dynasty in the 15th century, the imperial court’s admiral commanded his fleet to the Arabian Peninsula and East Africa […]

Asset values may plateau, and we have to begin rethinking the investment value of HDB flats.

BY HAIYANG ZHANG The Trump Administration recently retracted its promise to label China as a currency manipulator—and rightly so. While there was merit to such a claim ten or twenty years ago, labeling China a currency manipulator in 2017 simply misses the mark. In its semiannual foreign exchange report presented to the Congress on April […]

BY JESSICA SCHAUER LIEBERMAN On February 25th, the Democratic National Committee chose Thomas Perez, former Secretary of Labor and Harvard Kennedy School alum, as its new chair. The media billed the election that resulted in Mr. Perez’s victory as a battle for the party’s soul — a clash between its leftist and establishment wings. The […]

BY HAIYANG ZHANG In Europe, when the daughter of an aristocratic family reached the age of maturity, a debutante ball was traditionally the perfect occasion for a girl to present herself to the society as an adult. On Tuesday, January 17, President Xi Jinping became the first Chinese head of state to address the World […]

The Government of the Dominican Republic (DR) recently created the Presidential Commission on Road Safety (“Comisión Presidencial para la Seguridad Vial”) as a coordination table for improving the road safety and traffic education in the country. These are two problems that need immediate public attention. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), using 2013 data, […]

Privatizing SMRT in July has longer-term implications for efficiency and resilience of our public rail network

BY SARAH TESAR AND PITICHOKE CHULAPAMORNSRI The people of San Francisco, hoping to transform their city into a bustling economic metropolis, built the Golden Gate Bridge to connect two previously divided urban areas. During the peak of the Great Depression, the city issued forty-year municipal bonds that paid 5% interest in order to finance the […]

BY JOE LEE For decades, Times Square was severely congested, prone to pedestrian accidents, and lacking spaces to rest. In 2008, New York City sought to tackle these problems by mapping the diversity and number of human activities that occurred there. It traced walking patterns to identify “pedestrians’ desire lines” in relation to sidewalks and […]

BY BENJAMIN GOH In 2015, Business Insider magazine predicted ten million self-driving vehicles will be on US roads in the next five years.[i] While many people are eagerly awaiting the ability to read, eat, or check email as their cars themselves do the driving, this raises a whole host of critical questions. Who is at fault if […]