Dr. Xiaohong Tan – Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies

Dr. Xiaohong Tan

Independent Urban Researcher and Planner
Urban Studies

Early Career Fellow
FRIAS Fellowship Programmes
October 2026 – May 2027

Website

ORCID ID

E-Mail: tanxh9@gmail.com

Last Update: 01.09.2026

Curriculum Vitae

Xiaohong Tan is an urban researcher and planner specialising in urban regeneration, participatory planning and urban governance. She studied urban planning at Sun Yat-sen University and Peking University before receiving her doctorate in Urban Regeneration and Planning Theory from the University of Kassel. She subsequently served as Assistant Professor at Guangdong University of Technology and as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Kassel.
Her research explores the governance and knowledge dynamics of urban regeneration, with particular attention to participation, social learning and the negotiation of planning conflicts. Empirically grounded in long-term field research in Chinese cities such as Guangzhou and Shenzhen, her work also develops comparative perspectives on planning practices in China and Germany.
Since 2019, she has led several funded research projects within the broader field of urban regeneration, addressing topics including artistic interventions, informal housing governance, heritage preservation and adaptive reuse, social innovation and urban gardening initiatives. She has published in international journals such as Habitat International, disP – The Planning Review, Urban Research & Practice, Journal of Rural Studies and Urban Planning.

Selected Publications

Tan, X., Xu, Y., & Rui, G. (2025). Community mobilisation through translation: A sustainable framework for participatory planning. Urban Planning, 10. https://doi.org/10.17645/up.9119
Tan, X. (2024). Alternative micro-regeneration strategies for urban villages in China? Social entrepreneurship-based artistic intervention in Aohu Village of Shenzhen. Transactions in Planning and Urban Research, 3(4), 364–383. https://doi.org/10.1177/27541223241289954
Tan, X., Altrock, U., & Liang, X. (2023). Towards collaborative planning: Deliberative knowledge utilization and conflict resolution in urban regeneration in South China. disP – The Planning Review, 59(4), 31–49. https://doi.org/10.1080/02513625.2023.2323820
Tan, X., Altrock, U., Wang, J., & Yue, J. (2022). Understanding experimental governance of urban regeneration from the perspective of social learning: The case of Kingway Brewery in Shenzhen. Urban Research and Practice, 17(2), 195–217. https://doi.org/10.1080/17535069.2022.2158042
Tan, X., & Altrock, U. (2016). Struggling for an adaptive strategy? Discourse analysis of urban regeneration processes: A case study of Enning Road in Guangzhou City. Habitat International, 56, 245–257. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.habitatint.2016.06.006

FRIAS Project

Urban Gardening as “a Way Out”: Negotiating Conflict, Cooperation, and Socio-Ecological Transformation under State-Led Urbanism in China and Beyond.

Urban gardening has emerged globally as a site where ecological care, grassroots agency and contested governance intersect. Yet its dynamics under state-led urbanism remain under-theorized. This project repositions gardening in China not as peripheral greening, but as a negotiated practice through which residents claim space, circulate knowledge and cultivate resilience within state-led urban development.
The project conceptualises gardening as a site of negotiation between informal practices, grassroots ecological care and formal governance frameworks. Theoretically, it develops a perspective of negotiated worlding under hybrid governance, linking insights from infra-politics and more-than-human urbanism to broader debates on informality, resilience and socio-ecological justice.
A comparative perspective examines urban gardening cases in South China alongside initiatives in Germany, treating them as related experiments responding to similar urban needs. By analysing how such initiatives mediate relations between communities, governance and urban nature, the project generates transferable insights into how everyday ecological practices contribute to urban resilience and climate adaptation across different political contexts.