CHINA ACADEMY OF URBAN PLANNING AND DESIGN

Their core work

CAUPD is China's national-level urban planning and design research institute, operating under the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development. They conduct applied research on city planning, land use policy, urban transportation, and housing strategy, and directly advise the Chinese government on major urban development decisions. In H2020 projects, their primary value is as an institutional bridge: they bring access to Chinese urban planning practice, large-scale city data, and government policy channels that no European partner can replicate. Both EU projects leveraged their position to study and advance sustainable, socially inclusive urbanisation across EU and Chinese cities in parallel.

What they specialise in

How they've shifted over time

With only two projects starting in 2017 and 2018 and no keyword metadata available, meaningful evolution analysis is limited. That said, there is a discernible progression: the first project (URBAN-EU-CHINA, CSA) was a coordination and platform-building action — establishing the EU-China dialogue infrastructure — while the second (TRANS-URBAN-EU-CHINA, RIA) moved into substantive joint research on urban sustainability transitions. This suggests CAUPD moved from network-building to research delivery within a short window, deepening their engagement rather than broadening it.

CAUPD appears to be deepening EU research engagement by moving from coordination roles into substantive joint research, suggesting appetite for more analytically intensive collaborations in sustainable urban development.

How they like to work

CAUPD participates exclusively as a consortium partner in both projects, never as coordinator — a pattern consistent with Chinese institutions navigating EU funding structures through European-led consortia. With 19 unique partners across 8 countries spread across just 2 projects, they operate within relatively large international consortia. Their role in both cases appears to be that of the essential Chinese institutional anchor: the partner whose presence unlocks access to Chinese cities, data, and policy circles.

CAUPD has worked with 19 distinct partners across 8 countries — a notably broad network for just two projects, reflecting the large multi-partner consortia typical of EU-China bilateral research programmes. Their geographic reach spans Europe and China, making them inherently a bridge organisation rather than a regionally contained partner.

What sets them apart

No other organisation on the European research landscape can offer what CAUPD does: direct institutional access to the planning and policy apparatus governing the world's largest and fastest urban expansion. Their connection to China's Ministry of Housing means that research conducted with them has a credible pathway to influence decisions affecting hundreds of millions of urban residents. For any consortium studying sustainable city development at scale, or seeking genuine policy impact in China, CAUPD is not interchangeable with any other partner.

Highlights from their portfolio

• TRANS-URBAN-EU-CHINA
  The larger and more research-intensive of the two engagements (EUR 192,031, RIA), focused on socially integrative urban transitions — a topic with direct policy relevance for both EU cohesion goals and China's new urbanisation strategy.
• URBAN-EU-CHINA
  As the predecessor platform-building project (CSA), this established the EU-China urban innovation network that made TRANS-URBAN-EU-CHINA possible, positioning CAUPD as a founding institutional anchor in EU-China urban research.