Los Angeles-Shanghai Collaborative Comparative Project Funded

Recently, the University of Southern California (USC) and Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU) joined forces to create the Institute of Cultural and Creative Industry (ICCI), based in Shanghai. As part of this initiative, the New Media Management Research Center was established, and the Shanghai enterprise Zizhu International Education Group agreed to fund collaborative research projects conducted by faculty from USC Annenberg and the SJTU College of Media and Design.

We are happy to announce that a proposal, jointly submitted by USC co-PIs Drs. Francois Bar and Hernan Galperin and SJTU PIs Drs. Zhou Dong and Zhu Jinyu, was approved.  This funding grant will allow the Connected Cities and Inclusive Growth (C2IG) research project at USC to expand and examine the ways in which the broadband infrastructures of Shanghai and Los Angeles operate within these urban cultural industries centers.  Team members for this comparative project also include Dr. Annette Kim (USC), and research assistants Matthew Bui (USC), Xiangyu Li (USC), and Diana Tsoy (SJTU).

With this project, the research team hopes to inform policy and theoretical debates about digital opportunities at the metropolitan level by mapping the availability of broadband infrastructure in Shanghai and Los Angeles over time (at the lowest geographical level available), and analyzing the socio-economic determinants and implications of the observed spatial distributions. Furthermore, this Los Angeles-Shanghai research project will inform the work of a larger research consortium that is undertaking similar efforts in large metropolises around the world, including New York, London, São Paulo, Santiago de Chile and Sydney.