ASCE Publications: What separates this journal from others that cover urban development?

Gang-Len Chang: This journal is the only one addressing urban planning and development from an engineering system perspective, and it has been one of the few journals to address these complex issues in both the developed and developing countries. It provides a bridge between civil engineers and urban planners, which enables them to improve collaboration and better address the increasing number of challenging issues in modern urban development.

ASCE Publications: Can you tell us some of the hot topics you are exploring now for the journal?

Gang-Len Chang: There are a couple important tasks that I see for JUP&D. The first is to address the evolution of commuting patterns -- satellite offices and telecommuting have increasingly changed the residential selection, urban development, and the resulting traffic congestion patterns. Most of our existing plans and practices remain focused on commuters’ daily drive, ride or walk. But more and more people may not commute every day, choosing to telecommute one to two times a week. This flexibility in working patterns may affect their choice of residential location. Hence, we, as a community, for both research and implementation, need to be thinking about how such changes in commuting and residential patterns will affect the urban planning process. And, how the existing planning models should be revised to account for some new emerging issues. I would like to explore this subject further and involve professionals from other disciples to collaborate with urban planners and civil engineers.

The other subject is megacities. Most of our major cities continue to grow bigger and bigger; evolving into the state of monster megacities. The infrastructure is not there to support the ever-increasing demands, and the problems that are surfacing. I would like to see more studies and papers that address this vital megacity issue. Areas I would like to see explored include:

• how to define the quality and efficiency of a city
• what is the optimum size of a city
• how to effectively evolve our current infrastructure to meet the growing demand, and transform each major city to be livable, sustainable, and also economically competitive.

ASCE Publications: What changes have you seen during your time as editor?

Gang-Len Chang: Since I took over the journal about 10 years ago, we have seen submissions increase and our readership grow. Part of that success is the carefully planned special issues we have published through the years.

ASCE Publications: Why civil engineering? Urban planning?

Gang-Len Chang: I look for papers with either a broad scope or a well-defined subject, as long as the work is grounded on imperative real-world problems. More importantly, the research results or lessons should be practically useful; not mathematically elegant (but difficult to use without sufficient and quality data). This journal receives global submissions with problems unique to different countries, their geography, and development standards. I would like to see more papers that can take those problems and highlight the similarities so that one solution can be applied in many different environments with minor customized modification. In brief, we appreciate papers that either improve the state of practice for urban planning or address the imperative needs on our focused areas in the near future.

ASCE Publications: Describe a good submission.

Over time, urban planning has become more interdisciplinary, a blend of transportation, urban planning, land-use development, and infrastructure management, rather than its own distinct civil engineering discipline. This evolution is ripe for collaboration and more interaction between other ASCE journals. One idea would be to host a workshop with other journals on a common theme, such as the megacity infrastructure management and investment. We could then convert workshop findings into articles as a special collection. I would encourage editors working on future special collections to invite researchers or practitioners from related areas, to write commentary articles so that JUP&D readers can see the subject issues from different perspectives.

ASCE Publications: What aspirations do you have for the journal moving forward?

Gang-Len Chang: Unlike many other engineering fields, with civil engineering you can make changes that very directly improve and impact the quality of the human experience or living environment. I grew up in Taiwan, a developing country at the time. I had ideas to make things better, and I wanted to implement them to improve the quality of the environment. I like that I can apply my expertise and work with others to contribute to the development of a sustainable and livable environment, and to developing a cost-effective means of improving the existing infrastructure systems.

ASCE Publications: Can you offer any advice to new researchers starting out?

Gang-Len Chang: I would like to shift the urban planning process. Urban planning professions in general are more conservative. As a discipline, we tend to focus on fixing immediate problems, or plan for the future with relative conservative view (e.g., some potential changes or impacts by other external factors), rather than taking a step back to see the larger network and long-term issues. I would like to raise awareness of these bigger-picture issues so that we can advance the profession and ultimately find solutions that address our changing urban patterns and critical issues increased with the exponential growth of cities.

I encourage new researchers to devote time to developing solid multi-discipline expertise. Identify critical problems that have continued to plague our society, and then target some of these to focus your research. Given those target areas of research, seek out related professional societies and play an active role to learn from senior fellows, and to find peer researchers to work with. Be aware of potential funding opportunities; and know which technical journals can publish your research findings. More importantly, through publications, conducting projects, and providing technical services (e.g., review papers, proposals), new researchers can develop good relations with potential sponsor agencies and journal editors to sustain their research activities.

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